


Deep water

by HoneyB7



Category: Eurovision Song Contest RPF, Melekseev
Genre: A little bit (?), Angst, Artem & Kostya friendship, Blood Drinking, Drama, Eurovision references, Human/Vampire Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, Kostya & his Mother Monster in some sort of mother & son relationship, M/M, Mild Sexual Content, Music & Literature references, My own vampire lore (?) (A bad one but I tried), Mélovin/Kostya conflicts, Other Eurovision contestants in little roles, Romance, Sad moments, Some Mélovin/Kristian K., Some Suspense, Tension, Vampire AU, Vampires fighting, Vampires killing, Violent Images
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-19
Updated: 2019-04-06
Packaged: 2019-06-13 02:52:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 19
Words: 141,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15354621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HoneyB7/pseuds/HoneyB7
Summary: Nikita Alekseev has been lonely for too long. With broken dreams in his hands and nothing left to lose, he gives in to the temptation that Kostyantyn, a mysterious guy with cold white skin, means to him. The problem is that Kostyantyn isn't a normal person; he's a shadow, those whom humans call 'vampires' through the influence of myths and fiction, and the attraction that flows between them, as passionate as sweet, as physical as emotional, will put all the concepts that govern his life in danger.Or more than that.Fall into the arms of a vampire, perhaps, will put at risk his entire existence.~Melekseev Vampire AU~





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! This is my darkest RPF to date and maybe this will be the last one, I don't know, but I hope this could be at last a little good reading for you. 
> 
> Please, forgive my poor English; Spanish is my first language and I'm working very hard to be better in others. I wrote this for fun, love and English practice. And for mere expression. 
> 
> If you read despite the mistakes and the silly details (with "the AU licence") that I chose for the plot, thank you so much! ♥
> 
> (((I have the Spanish version on my Tumblr, hbeloved7)))

The cold sinks into him like a stake; it pierces, inclemently, his heart. His eyes can see nothing, meanwhile; fog, grey, a light in the background, a tear forming a moon that seemed to observe him like that, paralyzed in the sky.

A smell surrounds him, that of the humidity of the forgotten books in the bookstore fused with that of the blood that it emanates from himself. Without being able to confirm it visually, he knows that he's on a bed made of books, sunk in their pages, in their stories, trapped forever in a story without beginning or end; he also knows, soon, that he's out in the open, alone, and is dying.

The moon that flickers in the sky breaks in two; it's as if two eyelids open. A red iris surrounds a pupil as dark as night, as death.

Like the unhappiness that, lately, he knows so well.

Red tears crowd over the moon's pupil. Blood falls like rain on him.

"Look at me," he listens. It's a sweet, beautiful voice. "I beg you. Just look at me…"

When he opens his mouth to answer, he feels how the rain fills him and drowns him, how it paralyzes and condemns him to a death that he longs for as much as he repudiates it. The moon closes, but the tears continue to rain on him. Although his sight is distorted and life abandons him to the rhythm in which his own blood does it, he feels observed.

By whom?

"I can't..." he thinks. Or does he say it? "I can't…"

"If you don't," he hears. The voice no longer speaks; sings, "I can't save you...

"If you don't, Nikita, you will die."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It follows in Chapter I, it's already online. Thanks! ♥


	2. I

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He doesn't know why, but it's like someone has been looking at him the last days.

**I**

**W** hen he awakens, he discovers that he’s about to fall off the bed. He accommodates himself as best as he can, asleep, and looks at the ceiling of his one-ambient apartment wrapped in a confusing sensation.

What the fuck have he just dreamed?

He turns to the left, where is his light table: fifty pages to finish  _The Gambler_ ; it follows  _Carmilla_. Sometimes he thinks if it’s true what he has been told so many times, that if he really reads too much and needs to stop before ending like Don Quixote, crazy, living in a reality that’s all he wants less reality itself. But he has been always like this, a noise surrounded by silence.

When and how did he end like this?

Then, while having a coffee before going to work, he thinks about the time when everything went out of hand. He was supposed to have a dream and this was the one who took him by the hand on the way, that singing was all that mattered to him in life. But, at his 25, only a little remains of this dreamy facet: he works at the bookstore eight blocks from his home from Monday to Saturday between 9 and 9, he walks on the way, he walks on the way back, and on Sundays at night he goes to a bar in the centre with an open mic, where he listens more than he sings. In the end, nothing: friends have been lost, girlfriends have tired, and dreams have withered enough to lose meaning in everything that constitutes him.

The funny thing is that the apathy is so much that he doesn’t even have the strength to be sad enough, to be sad to the point where he could need to do something about it.

He looks himself in the mirror: he’s ready. He’s not the Nikita Alekseev that he would have liked to be, a singer who could reach the hearts of those who heard him feel; he’s a book seller who hums songs while reading at work, a person bored of himself, with no impulse to change his destiny.

It’s an existence like so many others, one that no longer feels, that only lives in the concrete but not in what matters.

He takes the books from his table, puts them in his bag and leaves.

While he walks to the bookstore, he observes Kiev wrapped in the usual estrangement: some Ukrainian flags moving to the rhythm of the wind, the faint light that sneaks behind the grey clouds of autumn, broken streets, not arranged, well arranged, graffiti on the walls. The same atmosphere as always, the same Kiev who feels sad and therefore distant, because he’s not sad; he’s empty. Lately, however, he hasn’t observed the world with the usual apathy that he has since leaving the group in which he sang almost two years ago; there’s a vertigo that, recently, is chasing him.

A vertigo that, for the first time in a long time, leads him to this, to think about what happens to him in this turning in circles that’s his life these days.

He arrives to the bookstore, opens the gate, turns the door sign, turns lights on, plays ambient music on Spotify. When he sits in the chair of the point of sale table with _The Gambler_ on his lap, he thinks: when did this vertigo start?

From his bag, he extracts  _Carmilla_ , looks at it and caresses the cover wrapped in a confusion that sinks in him as deep as the cold has done in the dream.

It was that Sunday.

He was at the bar listening to a girl singing a song that he didn’t recognize, probably from Eurovision, a contest from where that girl used to cover songs almost every weekend; she didn’t look more than twenty-three years old. The bar, small and austere bar with violet lights and round tables for one or two, looked as dark as every time; the stage was the only thing that could be seen, in which there was a keyboard, a guitar and a microphone, no more. When the girl finished, he was one of the few to applaud her: the out of tune in the initial part of the song plunged into indifference to most of those present, apparently, which was a shame, because the end had been fantastic.

He saw her pass by him; Nikita gave her a weak but honest smile, which she reciprocated by nodding.

No one went on stage after her; he watched the white keyboard as if nothing else existed. He wanted to sing, he wanted nothing more than to do it, but last time, months ago, he had his voice out of tune when versioning Tekhnologiya’s 'Strannyye tantsy', all for the tremors to which he owed not only the failure of that night, but the end of his quest for success in music. He always ended trembling; the trembling led him to sing out of tune; disinterestedness was the only reward that he could wait after that, as had happened to the girl who had just sung.

The keyboard seemed to play, then, a melody that nobody else seemed to hear, not around him; it was as if they were alone, both of them, one playing the music, the other singing it with the heart. It was as if the keyboard, by the mere act of being there, in front of him, had the power to force everything.

To wake up his heart at last, after so long lethargy.

He questioned himself as he always did, refusing to see lights in his dark emotions: why would sing, if he had stopped doing it? He could continue reading, he could enjoy seeing unknown artists in that bar, he could entertain a little with what was close to his hands, but not that, not sing, not what he loved. Because his feeling towards music wasn’t only an invincible passion; it was about respect. He respected music.

He wasn’t going to outrage it with his lack of talent.

However, it was like a stem emerged from his heart; it was the memories of so many afternoons with him playing in front of the television, longing to be like the singers he saw passing through the screen. To sing; singing and building, through his voice, another universe around him, one where he didn’t cast any figure in fault, one where he no longer felt alone, because in his own voice he managed to find himself, his truth, his feelings.

Sing again, one last time, and build that universe like the first time. Do it with solid bricks, paint it with bright colours, fill with light the darkness in which nothing was found. Because it was not enough to read, that other thing that he always used to do to evade reality; singing was the only way to that discovery, to that happiness.

The legs, touched by the memories, moved him by its own; he advanced to the stage without looking back, possessed by the need. He sat at the keyboard, greeted the audience, and with more awkwardness than talent he played a well-known melody, that of 'I poletim' by Sofia Rotaru in a ballad adaptation that he himself had made so long ago, when he still knew how to raise, with his voice, the foundations of the universe to which he actually belonged.

He began to sing against the microphone positioned in front of his mouth. With a broken voice and a trembling making him his own, he slipped every word of the first verse of his throat. He opened his eyes, and around his body he saw nothing but light. The people had vanished, also the darkness; he saw what he felt, he saw it clearly, and the world could not be, then, a better place.

What he would have wanted in his life, the only thing that mattered to him and for which he was the worst; this, singing, feeling the world with his voice and conferring to his reality that, his emotion, his truth.

Compare what he felt with an orgasm would be unfair, precipitated, because nothing could compare with that feeling. It was like understand why he was still alive; it was knowing that he could be happy nowhere else.

Never.

Happiness, that was it. There’s no other word to describe it. Is happiness. It was.

It will be.

Like his own heart took flight, as if he had wings to rise, as if he reached the sky, that built under his own concepts, and nothing could lower him from there. Ah, happiness! And Nikita wasn’t even sure if he was singing in tune, if he was playing the notes well with his basic knowledge of piano; possessed as he was running through that happily constructed bridge, running at full speed into the light he swore to see at the end of his own darkness, nothing more than closing his eyes he could, because he no longer needed to look, just melt into the sound, just release his voice, only that keyboard and him, in unison, expressing everything.

When he reached the chorus, he stopped his own fingers.

He closed his eyes with more force, gone, flying, and held the microphone with both hands without removing it from the stand of which it was holding. He sang, _a cappella_ , what followed; overwhelmed by tremors, emotion and happiness, blinded by the light that almost touched his hands, he felt that his chest was open, that a knife had opened it and his heart was out in the open, naked, exposed, but happy.

Enveloped at last in what he considers ecstasy: expressing what he felt through his voice, releasing it to erase the pain and allow himself to cling to happiness.

He sang the end of the chorus almost on the verge of tears, delivered to the situation, to the epiphany that singing will always mean to him. With eyes closed and frown, he heard applauses and exclamations.

"Very emotional!"

"A lot of feeling in the voice."

"Great!"

Soon, too absorbed in the happiness that he felt crashing against his exposed heart, he could do nothing against the stake.

He felt an intangible something, some kind of sensation, sink to the depths of his being.

Frightened by the power of the sensation, Nikita opened his eyes: in the shadows at the back of the place, a slow applause from a dark silhouette annulled him.

Trembling, unable to continue singing, he came down from the stage after thanking the applause, hurried and overwhelmed by the involuntary nudity that he felt all over his body, especially over his heart.

Returning to his table with clumsy, dizzy steps, he still felt the stake through him. He turned, barely, in a tremulous movement overloaded with a curiosity linked with fear, and looked for the silhouette in the darkness; nothing.

Nervous, he left the bar at full speed.

Fifteen blocks separated him from his apartment. He walked with his hands in his pockets while humming 'I poletim'; it was midnight and no one was wandering, not around that area of Kiev. Stirred by emotion and confusion, he walked faster than he used to, without running, but almost trotting. He felt that the world that he was glimpsing with his eyes was spinning and spinning around him.

Why?

He braked in a corner; there was no cars speeding through the streets, nothing stopped him, but he slowed down anyway. It was as if an anchor had slowed him down, something that didn’t allow him to advance further, not a step further. It was something that didn’t let him escape.

Something that wanted to take him.

He turned his head trembling even more than on the stage, clenching his teeth and also the fists he kept inside his pockets: nothing, there was nothing, only the usual, the streets, the estrangement.

The nothing.

He sighed and looked straight ahead. He felt that someone was looking at him, but he didn’t understand who was doing it or why. The sensation immersed him in the vertigo: feeling himself observed by nothingness gave him the sensation of losing everything, the contact with reality, the sanity, the stability that could so well maintain the grey routine of his grey existence. He was safe in his comfort zone; to sink into something different, to sink to the depths of an ocean of feelings that he didn’t want to feel, wasn’t something he wanted.

Not against his will.

He ran to his apartment. The next day, returning from work, he stopped at another corner, overwhelmed by the same intense feeling. Each day that followed to date he did; he has been running for eight days to return home, scared of the vertigo and clinging to the security that, although without possible happiness, the comfort zone gave him.

The anomaly to the sensation of vertigo just happened yesterday.

Nikita reads  _The Gambler_ without paying too much attention; it’s not the first time that he reads it, but he likes it enough to give it a rereading. After advancing twelve pages, he looks up from the letters to look at  _Carmilla_ , which is on the right on the table of the point of sale.

It was yesterday, yes: he was closing, he had already done the day's accounts, he had turned the sign on the door, he had turned off almost all the lights, except the one in the background, and he only had to keep _The Gambler_ in his bag and lock the door. He did the first thing, but at that precise moment the light from the back of the bookstore blinked. Missing, Nikita looked to the right, to the left, when a gust of wind opened the door abruptly.

Vertigo covered him just as the cold of autumn did.

He ran to the door and closed it tightly; he was agitated and his body was trembled like every damn time. A dry noise made him spin around in a jump.

A book had fallen off a shelf.

The light stopped blinking. Breathing hard, Nikita walked slowly towards the book.

He picked it up:  _Carmilla_  by Sheridan Le Fanu.

Without thinking too much, driven by the irrational fear that tamed him, he took the book and put it in his bag.

When he left, he didn’t feel any vertigo. Although nervous during the first three blocks, he managed to maintain his composure. He stopped running, he walked agitated, but calmer, and when he arrived at his apartment, while he was eating, he checked the Wikipedia on the cell phone.  _Carmilla_ , one of the first stories ever written about vampires, precursor of  _Dracula_  and the basic structure of the stories of the genre, also subtle influence on eroticism through the intimate relationship of the female main characters.

Laura and her quiet life until the appearance of Carmilla, a beautiful, enigmatic, charming and terrifying young woman...

Driven by an impulse, he put a guide on the first page. He had never read it, he had barely heard it mentioned at some time, but it was as if something was asking of it, something to which, with so many strange sensations surrounding him in the last days, it didn’t worry him that it had no explanation.

Perhaps, if  _precisely_  that book fell to the ground by the wind wasn’t casual. It has presented in his life on the eighth day of vertigo, the eighth, the eight, the number that he has always conferred some mysticism. Maybe, that book could give him luck.

Perhaps, with its presence, he could manage to appease the vertigo that terrified him so much.

He reads ten more pages of  _The Gambler_ , serves two customers, sends some emails to replace missing, checks the stock, reads more pages. He sighs when the afternoon comes and observes it from behind the table in the point of sale, the outside so close and so far away at the same time.

He ends _The Gambler_  at five. Rereads the last sentence three times.

" _No: tomorrow all shall be ended!”_

He closes the book and remains in an absent state for the following hours. Attends five more clients, much more than those who come on Tuesday, while wondering if perhaps so many sensations of vertigo, persecution and fear are creation of his mind or testimonies of reality. He knows that he’s spinning in a vicious circle; although they have applauded him the last time, he knows that he will never be the singer he has always dreamed and that it’s time to look for other alternatives in his life and been more realistic, stop reading so many books, frequent more people, get a girlfriend, get married, have children, something. Whatever!

He needs something and needs it now, something that frees him, that nourishes him, that gives him the happiness that only music can give him with that power that’s more erotic than sex, because it's raw happiness, the most perfect orgasm that a sensitive human being can feel.

It's already night, a long time ago; as usual, in Kiev the night arrives earlier at that time of the year. At eight o'clock, he wonders again why his boss, a millionaire who doesn’t need this bookstore but feels the need to take advantage of his position to encourage culture among the population through this business that no significant gain gives him, insists on opening until so late even in cold seasons.

"It's never a bad time to go and pick a book," he always says.

Winter is approaching, it’s very cold. End of the year is seen a little closer from November, another year of his life thrown into the wind. Nikita looks around and understands that he must leave the vicious circle, that he must break the walls that imprison him in the comfort zone and build something maybe not perfect, but healthy, on the ashes of his greatest dreams, but he doesn’t want it.

How do you leave without want it?

Frustrated, he looks at  _Carmilla_  again: he hasn’t started it. The day has gone in vague, disconnected and incoherent tribulations, and perhaps he should stop waiting for signals where there’s nothing but chance. He can’t do nothing but laughing at himself.

That this book fell was that, chance.

He begins to prepare slowly to leave at nine o'clock, or nine to ten, taking advantage of the fact that the boss will never know it because he only goes to business on Saturdays; he turns his back to the door to accommodate some catalogues he has left forgotten on the table, bends down to stack some untidy books on the last shelf of the furniture, and he hears how the door opens abruptly because of the wind, again.

The sound startles him; still crouching, he remains still, holding his breath. The light flickers in the bookstore and the cold envelops him violently, like a veil that doesn’t allow him to react.

The door closes smoothly; some steps are heard, slow, almost lazy. Nikita stands up holding the piece of furniture and turns between tremors born of the cold and the fear that have been linked like two furtive lovers in his heart.

" _Carmilla_ ," says who is in front of him while caresses the cover of the book that, new and unread, remains on the table.

Nikita doesn’t answer. He can do nothing to stop shaking, but not because of the cold or because of the vertigo; it’s about the eyes that look at him, one blue and one almost white, as smiling as the mouth with thin and aesthetic lips enclosing bright, elongated teeth.

Beautiful.

Nikita sighs the stress that fills him. He has in front of his eyes a boy who’s no more than twenty years old. He’s dressed in black like any other teenager in a period of rebellion, but no; something in him looks like a post-punk fan of the eighties; his face brushes the white colour, looks inhuman in contrast to the black hair combed to the side. He stares at him with unequal eyes; his hand, as white as his face and with delicate structure, almost feminine and with pointed nails, similar to a triangle, remains on the book.

Nikita swallows. The eyes don’t allow him to speak, think, feel; he’s in a trance, as if the eyes were arms and held him in place, as if he weren’t allowed to escape. Meanwhile, the light continues to blink; the complete image of the stranger becomes almost ghostly because of the effect.

To stop looking at him is, suddenly, impossible.

"You need something?" Nikita asks in a murmur that, to his dismay, fully denotes the magnitude of his nervousness.

The boy smiles with such emphasis that Nikita feels, somehow, that despite his imposing image, he expresses nothing than sweetness. In some way, beneath so much black it lays an unbreakable purity.

What’s he thinking about?

Unequal eyes go from  _Carmilla_  to him once, twice, three times.

"I came to look," the boy says. He still smiles, "but I saw  _Carmilla_  and I approached without being able to avoid it. Have you read it?"

Nikita swallows again. He feels intimidated; the boy is younger than him and isn’t more than a client of so many, but intimidates him. Why? He answers with annoyance more directed to himself than to him:

"I Don’t. I was going to start it today, but..."

"Oh, you'll love it," the boy says, fascinated. All his gestures are elegant, "it's fantastic. Unfortunately, it was forgotten if you compare it with other classics of the genre, but it was as important as the others."

Nikita smiles without realizing it. He can’t with himself: he likes to read and to talk to people that likes what he likes, more now, considering the depth of his loneliness. It's like talking to people who like to sing or play music, make it or listen to it; nothing gives more pleasure than feeling accompanied in a certain passion.

Nothing gives more pleasure than not feeling alone.

Abandoned.

"I read that," Nikita replies, "I'll start it tonight, I guess..."

He’s ashamed when he says it and expresses it with a nervous laugh. What can it matter to that strange boy what he will do or not tonight? He’s so desperate for attention?! Without wanting to look him in the eye and thus expose his own shame, he looks at the clock that hangs on the wall behind the computer that he has already turned off: nine past ten.

At what point have so many minutes passed?

He turns to the stranger: he has his back to him looking at the library of classics. He takes a book, then another, then one more from the poetry section, and leave them on the table at the point of sale.

 _A season in hell_ ,  _Werther_ ,  _Frankenstein_.

"Good books.  I like it very much… _Werther_ …" Nikita says as he prepares the purchase ticket by hand. He shouldn’t sell anything to him considering the hour, but how to tell him something, if the one that has left hopelessly advance the clock has been himself and his irresponsibility?

"Very good. And you have good titles; more and more bookstores forget to sell more than bestsellers." The stranger smiles when paying him what Nikita tells him when he gives him the ticket. "I'll be back for more!"

They rub their hands when the boy gives him the money. The cold that he feels from his side paralyzes Nikita. It’s true that it’s cold outside, but in the bookstore it’s tempered.

How…?

Nikita withdraws his hand with some urgency. The boy notices it, apparently, but only smiles once more.

"Thanks..." Nikita says without looking at him, concentrating on ordering the money.

"Thanks to you, uh... What's your name?"

They look at each other. Nikita doubts, but the eyes that are arms and hold him with strength forces him.

He whispers his name. The boy shows his teeth in a smile that, to his surprise, Nikita recognizes not only as beautiful, but as charming.

"Kostyantyn," he replies, and as he takes the books from the table, which Nikita has put in a paper bag with the bookstore’s logo in the front, he leaves.

Only when he does it the light stops blinking.

Nikita gives up when leaning on the table. What has happened? What was that all about? Tired of himself, he takes  _Carmilla_  from the table, puts it in his bag and leaves as quickly as possible. He walks the eight blocks in silence; as soon as he opens the door of his building he realizes that he hasn’t felt the vertigo. For the second time in more than a week, no, he hasn’t felt it.

Goes up, changes clothes, dinners, goes to bed. With the light of his night lamp as a companion, he opens _Carmilla_  with an anxiety that he hasn’t felt at all for a long time, neither with life nor with what he does, with nothing but singing, although the latter ends badly each time, since singing in the bar with an open mic reminds him that his dreams with music, whenever he trembles like that, will never be fulfilled.

" _In Styria, we…_ " he reads in a whisper.

Because reading is the only thing he can do at this moment, the only thing that will help him.

The only thing in the world that will make him forget the loneliness, the boredom, the broken dreams and Kostyantyn, the unequal eyes of Kostyantyn holding him and his cold hand freezing his reality with a touch.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you got to this point, thank you!
> 
> Some (I hope) brief comments about this RPF: 
> 
> It's very stupid of me to write a story set in a country that I know from some documentaries, articles and Eurovision, nothing else (?), But believe me, I worked hard. I checked the opening and closing hours of bookstores, I walked through different streets thanks to Google Maps (?), I found out what time the day dawned and dusk in the month in which I set the story, etc. Surely there will be a thousand million absurd details, sorry for that, but I hope the effort is noticed at least a little.
> 
> But hey, this is an AU. XD I apologize in that way for all my mistakes.
> 
> The bar with open mic, here in Buenos Aires it happens, open mic is left for anyone who wants to use it for a night, whether to read poetry, sing, things like that. I've seen it and used it here as a way in which Nikita can sing, even if it's just a book seller, like a lifesaver that could serve as an element in this story. 
> 
> The owner of the bookstore is based on real facts: in my city, there is a bookstore with a very similar story of a millionaire who decided to open his business to contribute to the culture. He also opened an publishing company and has great prestige here.
> 
> About the references to books and songs, how I write this story for mere entertainment, for myself and for what I feel at this moment of my life, I wanna mention books that I loved and songs that means a lot for me. 
> 
> 'I poletim' by Sofia Rotaru is the song that Nikita sang in a tribute to that singer. It's my favorite live performance of him, by far: it makes me cry every time that I listen to it. If by chance you didn't hear it, it's on his YouTube channel. It's marvelous!
> 
> Niki knows how to play piano? I saw pictures of him with a keyboard, so maybe he has a basic knowledge IRL. But... This is an AU (?). XD HAHA
> 
> I will try to update soon. I feel a little insecure right now, but we will see. 
> 
> I hope you like it and sorry for my countless mistakes...: ')
> 
> Thank you! ♥


	3. II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> All this nonsense means something? Nikita is confused and Kostyantyn's eyes doesn't help at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Forgive my English, please. One day I will be better, I swear. 
> 
> Thanks for reading. ♥

**II**

" _You and I are one for ever_ ," he rereads when, in the bookstore, resumes _Carmilla_  after reading some chapters before to sleep the night before. The words disturb him, the whole story of Laura, Carmilla and their encounter do it, and as Carmilla is pleasurable to Laura even though she also floods her with disgust, the same thing happens to him.

He sighs looking at the shop window from the inside, noticing the weak light of a new cloudy day of that November that begins to approach, with its advance, the coldest winter.

Kostyantyn, that's how he called himself.

He puts the guide against the last page read, marks the paragraph by passing his nail with force over the margin and closes the book not without annoyance.

Isn’t he behaving like a madman, like a delusional? From that night in the bar, while he sang 'I poletim', that his days of total monotony have come to an end against his will. The silhouette that applauded, the vertigo, the wind, the blinking light,  _Carmilla_ , Kostyantyn and the unequal eyes holding him.

There’s no correlation. It’s not possible that there is. It’s only him and his excess of reading; he, the one whom is losing his screws one by one because of loneliness and unhappiness, eager in some corner of his being to live something intense again, to not be alone, to counteract the darkness that envelop him with something powerful. It’s nothing more than that, a huge chance born of delirium, not of reality.

But how much he does long for something towards the end. How much, with what power he longs to have the energy to get out of there even if his dreams are never going to…

The door opens. Nikita is startled, but disguises well: she’s a client who often comes to buy books about sociology, anthropology and other disciplines.

He attends her, loses himself in what he does and doesn’t think anymore, nor does return to  _Carmilla_. The day passes quickly thanks to everything that has emerged this Wednesday: receive orders, reorder sections, update prices, make refunds. Seven o'clock arrive and the night is a fact; Nikita looks at the window and evades the desire to continue with  _Carmilla_.

Nine o'clock arrive; Kostyantyn hasn’t returned.

He leaves wrapped up in embarrassment. Why can’t he think about something else? It's all product of his mind, yes, and he has no one to ask for advice, no family, no friends, no close neighbours, no one.

In the same way, it passes Thursday and Friday: at a quarter past eight, he decides not to continue with  _Carmilla_ ; he will read something else, something more modern, maybe something _mainstream_ , something silly and meaningless, whatever he needs to be distracted. Looking at the  _bestsellers,_  he feels that nothing wakes up interest in him.

The light blinks from one second to the other; Nikita contains the scream of impression that the fact urges him to utter.

He turns his back to the  _bestseller_  table and looks at the door.

"Hi, Nikita."

Kostyantyn smiles at him and everything returns to be as in the first encounter: to stop looking at him is, suddenly, impossible.

"H-Hi…" Nikita whispers, not knowing if a minute or ten has passed, or maybe just a second from visual contact and impossibility.

"I come to watch."

"Of course…"

Nikita returns to his chair behind the table in the point of sale. Nervously, he stares at the cover of  _Carmilla_  thinking that Kostyantyn wanders around the establishment, determined not to look at him anymore, but no: Kostyantyn goes to the table and puts a hand on the book, just like the first time.

"You read it?"

"The first chapters."

"Isn’t it great?"

"I like it, yes… It's not a frequent theme for me, I don’t feel special attraction for vampires, but I like it."

"Don’t you feel attracted to vampires?"

When he asks, Nikita observes him timidly: he notes surprise in the unequal eyes, a surprise of a child, not of a man.

How pure he feels him. What overflowing with life he is opposed to his constant melancholy.

Nikita shakes his head; Kostyantyn goes from surprise to a subtle disappointment.

"I'll have to recommend other books to convince you."

Convincing him? Nikita laughs, but he does it out of commitment; inside, he wonders what he means by that. Convince him of what? Convince him for what?

"Then…" he hears Kostyantyn whispers. The voice sounds shy, of a little boy of fifteen and not the twenty years guy that he seems to be, "what attracts you?"

Nikita responds by inertia. He feels nervous, although he doesn’t feel the vertigo. It’s annoyance what that fills him the most, to experience such an uncomfortable feeling with Kostyantyn, that pleasant sensation that causes him mixed with the disgust with which he fills his heart.

"Mmm… Tolstoy? Wilde?"

"Oh, Wilde…" Kostyantyn exclaims in a sigh that reveals adoration.

Nikita notes, observing him, that his body language has a different kind of grace than other people he has known. There’s a certain theatricality in how he moves his hands, in how he crosses his fingers, in how he bends his face to emphasize each word he utters. He swallows when he discovers himself immersed in the same, in looking at him and studying him and not managing to escape.

" _Dorian_  is one of my favourites," Nikita comments, trying to do so, escape, but at the same time wanting, awkwardly, the conversation to stretch.

That Kostyantyn, despite the disgust, doesn’t leave.

"I don’t like his novels so much, but as a child I read his tales," Kostyantyn tells him, "as ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’, I adored it…"

Nikita is more excited than he thinks he is. Maybe his eyes betray him when he feels the emotion overflow him, because Kostyantyn smiles at him with his perfect teeth.

Perfect, yes.

...What the hell is wrong with him? Why does he get so carried away by delirium?

"I think it's still my favourite tale," Nikita confesses. He knows he’s blushing and confused, but for the first time in months he feels he doesn’t care to be like that in front of another person.

Now, nothing reigns in him more than the need to feel desire to triumph over the darkness that fills him all the damn days. Do it, yes, through a dialogue that refers to one of the things that he’s passionate about. It’s not the music, the emotional orgasm of his life, but the books.

It’s art, the only thing that matters to him and for the least qualified he is.

"It's one of my favourites too, as a child I read it over and over again… It broke my heart, you know, how the nightingale's sacrifice ended up being useless, as the girl ended up despising the feelings of the young boy just as if no feeling had more meaning than a material good," Kostyantyn says, and even his way of sighing is peculiar to Nikita.

Nikita feels, above all, that the description of the plot echoes in his own reality.

"I know," he replies, "always, since I was little, that rejection seemed sad to me, that of the girl to the rose. It's something that… I find it emotional…"

He shrugs, still sitting in the chair, looking at Kostyantyn from far below considering the more than four inches of height that he has in advantage, extended because he’s standing. The white of his skin is abnormal, without doubt it’s makeup; he has neither a mark nor an imperfection, and his unequal eyes seem to jump from his face. They are two chains that can reach him even if he run, run and run along the most extensive streets.

Kostyantyn smiles again. The grace that embellishes him is strangely hypnotic.

"Do you find it emotional for a particular reason?"

"Yes."

"Which reason?"

Nikita closes his eyes. How does he open his mouth like that? Why does he talk more than he should?

Can someone care about his pain, his fear, that something from his past that will always be hard?

Feeling invaded and uncomfortable about it, he answers without answering:

"When you give your heart to a person and this person rejects it… When you love someone, when you _want_ to love someone and that person rejects you and…"

"Abandon you."

"Yes…"

"We learn from everything. But we never have to give up, right? We shouldn’t let those who hurt us win. No feeling that harms us should last us forever; only what makes us feel  _alive_  should prevail."

Nikita watches him. He doesn’t fully understand what’s so intolerable when he looks at him, what he generates between the pleasant and the disgust as to reduce him to this, to look at him silently and with a fixity that his innate shyness doesn’t allow him to maintain with anyone. Soon, fiddling with his own hands on his lap to appease the discomfort, he just agrees when nods.

The disgust wins: he needs to escape from this situation.

"I have to close, I'm sorry," Nikita says, cold, "if you need something, I can…"

Kostyantyn moves away from the point of sale and goes to the classics.

 _The picture of Dorian Gray_.

"I will give it a new opportunity and, when I return, we can comment on it. Ah!" Kostyantyn returns to the library, searches, searches, and when he finds a book he returns to the table with it. Nikita looks at the thin and small book:  _The Vampyre_  , by John William Polidori. "I can’t believe you have it, it's hard to get!" Kostyantyn says with teenage enthusiasm.

Nikita, who has decided not to look at his eyes, prepares the ticket and hands it to him. He freezes his whole life with a touch, again.

When Nikita puts the two books in the paper bag, Kostyantyn takes out  _The Vampyre_  and gives it to him.

Nikita leans back, on the chair; when he does so, Kostyantyn leans forward.

"It's for you," the boy assures him in a provocative murmur, "Polidori created the modern literature vampire based in the image and likeness of Lord Byron, whom he clearly didn’t have in a good concept. Is too short; it will like you!"

He takes the bag, greets it by nodding, smiling, and leaves. Nikita drops himself against the back of the chair.

When he walks home, nothing. There’s no vertigo, there’s no pain.

There’s nothing more than bewilderment.

The next day, he works normally, although with uneven eyes always in the background, bothering somewhere in his thoughts. His boss goes to the bookstore, they talk, they organize, they review the sales and Nikita leaves without vertigo, again. The next day, he reads another chapter of  _Carmilla_  despite of having decided not to continue.

" _You must come with me, loving me, to death; or else hate me and still come with me. And_ hating _me through death and after._ " he reads out loud stretched out on his bed, noticing in the sky that he watches through the window of his apartment the imminent death of a new sunset.

At night, needing to get distracted, he decides to go to the bar with open mic. Walking there, he promises that he will not sing, that it’s better not to do it. It’s better to leave that addiction aside, that need to paint another world to his own around with his voice.

Why, if that will not solve anything?

He arrives at the bar and sits at the usual table; a couple of people greet him, maybe in confidence to see him almost every Sunday, but he returns the gesture with a shyness that nothing but coldness conveys. He listens to the girl from the other time, who on this occasion sings a song that he’s sure to have heard in Eurovision by Ukraine, although he doesn’t remember in which year.

" _Sweet people…_ " he whispers singing in unison with who’s on stage.

She doesn’t miss any note, not this time; Nikita applauds her with the rest of the audience at the end, when with the last notes of the keyboard she concludes her performance. When she gets off, they smile to each other again. In addition to having a voice that pleases him sincerely, she looks pretty with her black and straight hair and her small but harmonious body; maybe, if he tries…

If they have a drink and…

The impact comes without warning, stuck in his back with the power of a thousand knives. A chill run through him from head to toe.

It’s the vertigo.

Instantly, he turns to the obvious place, where two weeks ago he had seen a silhouette applauding him from the darkness.

No one.

He covers his face with one hand and rubs it violently; the vertigo is sharp as never before, dizzies him, gives him the feeling that he will fall at any time, bleeding, without any life in the body. Desperate both for the sensation and the fact of being in front of so many people, Nikita holds on to the table and seeks to normalize his breathing. Is it a panic attack? He has never had one, he doesn’t know the symptoms, but anything is better than believing what he begins to believe, that something strange happens, that nothing is chance in his life since the silhouette applauded him that time.

"Good evening," he hears.

He turns abruptly to the stage: Kostyantyn, Kostyantyn dressed in black and makeup in white, looking like an English post-punk fan with a hat covering his head; he’s staring at him from the stage, sitting in front of the keyboard.

"This song is mine, I composed it  _very_  recently. I hope you like it!"

He says everything looking at him fixedly, only to him.

Kostyantyn puts the hands over the keyboard. A second of silence, a silence as deep as the level of vertigo that sinks more and more inside Nikita, and Kostyantyn, taking his eyes off him, plays with astonishing skill the keys. Nikita feels that the world falls around him, that it disappears.

That is reborn in something else. In something better.

" _Babe, my heart is just a hooligan…_ " Kostyantyn sings, and Nikita feels that his heart is exploding, that it’s falling apart because of the knives that have been so firmly stuck in his back, that he’s facing a new world in front of a revelation.

His voice.

His voice is simply wonderful.

The English that Kostyantyn pronounces isn’t so good, neither is his, but the lyrics are understood enough: it’s a warning. He doesn’t know if he has written it with that intention, if that is what he’s trying to say, but Nikita, alone with Kostyantyn in that world that has manifested itself between the voice of one and the ear of the other, so it feels, that Kostyantyn is throwing a warning.

That this warning isn’t dedicated to anyone but him.

But his voice, his voice! Emotional, young, deep and precious, a voice that knows exactly how to transmit the emotions it transmits, that knows how to paint a new world around who listens. And how easily he has done it, that Nikita never notices the tear that rolls down his cheek.

Only Kostyantyn’s voice and the colours he paints around him, red colours of amazing intensity, passion, beauty, he can see, feel, touch.

Wish.

But if he has this ability, but if he can absorb him in that way, with such simplicity, then…

" _He'll tear you apart…_ "

Why? 

" _Part, part, part… He'll tear you apart!_ "

Why will he tear it apart? 

“ _Part, part, part… He'll tear you apart!_ "

 _Who_  will be tear apart? 

" _Part… part…_ "

Kostyantyn's eyes point to him when he stops playing. The sadness that screams at him with that unequal colours freezes his skin. Nikita just needs to look him in the eye to know that he’s not alone in this world that Kostyantyn has formed with the voice, that he’s not alone in this different world that Nikita manages to conceive with his own eyes.

He’s, willing or not, accompanied.

" _Part…_ " Kostyantyn ends.

Applause filled the place, exclamations of admiration too, but Kostyantyn pays no attention; he only looks at him. Sad, he looks at him, and although no music sounds anymore, Nikita still feels immersed in another world. He's not in that table, in that scenario; he's in another place.

Flying.

Or is he sinking?

Kostyantyn's gaze, uneven and captivating, doesn’t move from him; Nikita feels that he collapses from the inside, that his heart is destroyed for no reason and for all the reasons.

He gets up and runs away.

He leaves the bar, turns right, runs, runs, and doesn’t even realize that he’s not going to his apartment; he’s adrift in an unknown ocean, he swings towards the horizon without leaving anything behind, alone, as the most ephemeral being, one that no trace has been able to leave.

It's the end. The madness it is.

It's been too much! From the applause of the silhouette and the wound caused by the vertigo stake that nothing but  _Carmilla_  and incomprehension seemed to exist.

Nothing else exists, no, apart from the unequal eyes that, without understanding why, he can’t stop looking.

Without air after so much running, brakes in a corner. It drizzles, and the cold is mixed with the heat that the activity has given to him. He looks at the light post on the corner; the vertigo embraces him stronger than ever.

The light blinks.

Why so many coincidences united to confuse him? Is it a sign that it’s time to do something with his life, or are random facts arranged side by side and without correlation or meaning when are contemplate in totality?

He turns around: Kostyantyn has the shoulders of his black coat wet; he has been there for a while, whole minutes. The eyes of uneven colour observe him with the same sadness of the stage.

"You didn’t like my song?" he asks.

Nikita has a nervous laugh: yes, he must be going crazy. So much loneliness, so many hours of reading books, so long without feeling anything has confined him to not understanding reality, to decoding it badly, to not being able to feel in contact with it.

Unable to understand what’s happening, driven by madness, with nothing but the heart exposed, he manages to answer:

"You have a lot of talent, a lot. I…"

"Do you think so?" Kostyantyn seems excited.

"Yes…"

"You flatter me. Although I don’t think I'm even eighth as good as you are."

Kostyantyn smiles at him under the blinking light. Nikita knows that he’s honest, that he means it for some reason, one absurd and far from his understanding.

Why?

"I'm not that good."

"Oh, yes you are!"

"Don’t…"

"Of course, Nikita! You left me stunned the other night, with your piano version of 'I poletim'…"

Only then Nikita realizes what’s evident: the silhouette of that night, the silhouette that had applauded him and then disappeared…

"You had seen me before coming to the bookstore…"

Discovered, Kostyantyn laughs like a child.

"A beautiful chance to find you later. That Sunday you left so fast that I had no way to talk to you! You put so much heart on stage, so much… I needed to thank you for such a brilliant performance!"

The words pierce Nikita when he sees Kostyantyn moved in the most honest way, being shy but visceral, being genuine. He feels that he collapses again, that he longs to leave and never expose himself again, not like this, before one stranger, one person of so many, one of all the others who will never understand the absurd reasons why he can’t get ahead. He’s confused, tired and scared; he's tired of not wanting to, of turning and turning as if he were nothing more than a rodent on his wheel, running in circles, always in the same place despite feeling that he’s advancing.

"No…" Nikita whispers. He wants to run, he wants to get away from Kostyantyn, but his eyes are the ones who stop him, "I don’t think…"

"Don’t reject what you feel; don’t be your own rose, Nikita." Kostyantyn, who has had his hands in his pockets during the conversation, takes them out of there. He advances three steps towards him, raises a hand with clear intentions to touch him, but brakes just before reaching his right cheek. "I sing since I was a child, I love music: I don’t think I'm delirious when I consider that I have enough criteria to recognize a talent. You have something different, Nikita… You are…"

And he caresses him: Kostyantyn's pointy index finger just touch the mole of Nikita's right cheek, the one that’s just below his eye. The look that they maintain in each other freezes time and space.

How cold is his finger. How warm it makes him feel inside, in his heart, to perceive that cold.

What a strange way to remember that even in spite of how unhappy he has become, he’s still alive.

Nikita gasps between surprise and rejection. The disgust triumphs when he sets aside to break the hypnosis to which the caress has induced him in communion with the gaze. With his eyes on the ground, he asks:

"Why did you follow me?"

Kostyantyn keeps looking at him, he knows it; the feeling of not being able to go away makes him know.

"Because I saw you devastated."

"Devastated?"

"I don’t tend to relate to anyone, I'm a loner, I have some phobia to people. But it was so much what your voice struck me, it was so sad what I felt you, that…"

"What?"

They look at each other again. The light from the street blinks more insistently, as if the energy that runs around them, dense and in constant fluctuation, it doesn't only affect their bodies, but also the environment.

"I thought that you and I could  _understand_  each other."

Nikita doesn’t react, he has no capacity to do so. He remains there, in front of Kostyantyn, without knowing what he wants or why he does it. He can only think about music, how much he loves it and how much he respects it, to the point where he isn’t capable of outraging it with his lack of talent. No, he will not.

Never again. Never again he will go away.

He will never go again to the universe of red colours that Kostyantyn, with so much simplicity and truth, has painted around him tonight.

"I can’t, sorry..." Nikita murmurs with a sad smile on his lips.

Without looking back, he turns and leaves. He walks trembling, longing for a change, for something to stop him, that what Kostyantyn has said it can be true.

But it’s not, and without any vertigo surrounding him and without a blinking light over his head he knows that he has wasted an opportunity.

Kostyantyn is the best singer he has heard in a long time; there’s art in his scenic attitude, there’s talent and emotion. And he likes to read, and his smile is charming, and…

How someone talented like him can be able to understand him, who’s only the worst…?

How someone like Kostyantyn, with the creative ability to create such an incredible world around who hears him, can tell to him that they could  _understood_ each other…?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First of all, thank you very much for read, for the kudos and for the comments on AO3 and Tumblr. Thank you with all my heart! That you give an opportunity to this story that so insecure (but falling in love) haves me makes me extremely happy.
> 
> Thanks for being with me in the process. :’)
> 
> About this chapter I don’t have so much to say, just warn that in the next chapter, which I hope to publish on Monday or Tuesday, we let's get to know the other point of view of this story, that of this mysterious boy who sings 'Hooligan’.
> 
> Who is him? Hahaha. XD 
> 
> Ah! About ‘Hooligan’: I have a crazy theory about this song and I want to apply that theory in this story. 
> 
> About Wilde: I think Nikita maybe has read him because his stage on ESC and ‘Chuvstvuyu Dushoi’ video; I want to make a reference to my own believe. And I have read an interview that he gave on Estonia where he told that he likes Tolstoy, so… XD 
> 
> Who knows? And Kostya? 
> 
> … AU! XD 
> 
> About 'Sweet people': I LOVE THAT SONG, Ukraine 2010. Sorry for that silly reference. I write a lot with Alyosha. I love her voice!
> 
> Hope you like it. :’)
> 
> This story it's just a smile in bad days for me, I just want to express myself. If you enjoy this, my smile is bigger than ever.
> 
> THANK YOU. Truly. ♥


	4. III

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So many coincidences can't happen at once, that feels Nikita. Meanwhile, Kostyantyn isn't so convinced of what he has decided to do.

**III**

He touches his knees with his fingers as if, suddenly, they were no more than the keys of a piano. He touches a key, touches another and thinks; he imagines a note and then another, and while moving his head he paints a melody.

Hey. Eh huh. Eh huh. Eh huh. Oh.

When the melody sounds inside his head with astonishing clarity, a smile is drawn on his mouth; when his mouth smiles, the warmth reborn in the depths of his icy existence.

He marks time with his foot while he attaches notes on his knees.  _I could do this_ , he says to himself inside of his head,  _or this other._   _I could_   _talk about dreams,_   _about the importance of never give up, about the freedom that’s in the feelings, the only possible freedom for an artist who feels too much._

 _I could speak about the angel, that resplendent angel_   _singing notes smothered by the abysmal vehemence with which feels_   _his heart._

He looks at his hands when he opens them right before his eyes:  _I can talk about what happens to me_ , he ends,  _I can talk about what’s happening to me._

 _I can_ …

"Kostya," he listens.

The music stops inside his head. Annoyed, Kostyantyn returns to the car and to the darkness, to the city that stretches in front of his gaze through the window.

"No," he responds.

Who drives doesn’t give up, however:

"Hey, Kostya…"

"I don’t want to hear a sermon, Artem, not now."

"Oh, come on…!" Artem mumbles as he slows down the car that takes them through the dark streets of Kiev.

Kostyantyn looks around: he has no idea of where he is, he only sees grey clouds. For three nights, that he sees, that he feels.

His heart, as dark as night and as dead as the rest of himself, covered by clouds and nothing else.

"You're over  _thirty_ , you don’t need to do it as often as a  _new born_ ," Artem explains without letting go of the car's steering wheel, "but I can see that you have weeks without  _feeding_  and it's time for you to do it; you are weak."

Kostyantyn crosses his arms as he lets himself fall against the backrest of the passenger seat.

"Anyway, weak or not, I can’t die."

"But soon you will not be able to move, and if you can’t move and I'm not around, the sun will fall on you. Come on! Why do you not feed? What's going on?"

"Nothing…"

All.

"I don’t believe you."

"Don’t believe me."

"Kostya, we are friends since you were _born_. Can you stop playing the enigmatic with me?"

"Seriously, Artem… Just leave me, it'll pass!"

He knows that Artem will not leave him, that he will investigate and inquire until he finds the root of his feelings. He knows, too, that Artem knows what is it, because the root never changes.

It’s always the same when it comes to him.

"Have you been thinking too much about  _that_?"

Kostyantyn laughs: yes, it's always the same.

* * *

 

_"You and I are one for ever."_

* * *

 

Just like Carmilla had told Laura.

"Sometimes I can’t help it."

Artem, as fraternal as ever, patted his chest. Kostyantyn smiles without hiding the frustration that, as he well knows, is impossible to disguise. It’s that this memory, despite the years that have passed, is still latent.

That wound still doesn’t close and needs to be done as soon as possible.

More now.

"I was supposed to return to resolve that matter, ok? Otherwise, I wouldn’t have stepped on Ukraine again even if I was desperate," Kostyantyn explains more seriously than usually with Artem, the best and only friend who has since  _birth_ , the only person for whom is 'Kostya'.

Nothing has wanted more than to return to Ukraine, nothing in the damn universe, but the wound has to close.

That's why, for how much he wants to stay in Ukraine, it _needs_ to close.

"I know, but it's not easy. Maybe  _he_  has already died…" Artem says, although he doesn’t look very convinced.

"I doubt it.  _He_ must be with  _her_  yet."

" _She_? Do you really think…?”

"Anyway…" Kostyantyn whispers to finish the topic.

Nobody knows if  _she_  exists or not, but something, during all these years, has made him believe that yes, that _she_ ’s real. Maybe it's just a feeling, a very absurd one, but…

"But just for that you don't _feed_ yourself?"

Artem's question, as incisive as a stab, makes him realize how obvious he is. It's just that he's never been good at hiding, even though he's spent both of his  _lives_  trying.

Behind Mélovin will be always Kostya.

"I don’t want to tell you," he replies.

"Oh, come on. What can be so terrible?"

"Well…"

When a smile escapes from him, Kostyantyn knows he’s lost: Artem will not stop until he finds out what is it.

"Tell me! What’s so terrible? "

"Is…"

"What?!"

"I… I  _chose_  someone."

Artem longs a laugh.

"And that’s why you don’t _feed_ yourself?! Are you kidding?! It should be the opposite, it shows that it's your first time! It was about time that you allowed yourself to _choose_ someone, you already refused too much to the impulse! Or maybe…?"

Kostyantyn is openly sad despite the smile that looks bright in his mouth: Artem always realizes everything.

"Kostya, humans don’t…”

"All right! I know! Let's not talk about this anymore, it will pass, I insist."

No, it will not.

"Ok," Artem responds with annoyance.

Kostyantyn knows that he doesn’t like it when he doesn’t tell him things, because when he doesn’t it means that he’s invaded by memories and pain, lonely in the face of a desperate adversity, but no, he prefers not to talk about this delicate matter.

About the voice of an angel sinking to the depths of his being with overwhelming simplicity.

About that voice echoing in the nothing that, apparently, Kostyantyn still has buried somewhere in his diabolical existence. A nothing that, incredibly, is still something.

"I allow you to change the subject, but I don’t allow you to be without _feeding_ , so let's go. I don’t accept negatives! We are going to look for the indicated victim," Artem proposes when consulting the file on his cell phone.

"I'm not in the mood right now, I'll be fine!"

"You will not."

"But…!"

"Mélovin, look at me."

Kostyantyn swears that a chill run through him, one too human, impossible for someone like him. But it runs; perhaps in a symbolism, the sensation has manifested itself.

His face mutates from the pain to the crudest coldness when he looks at Artem.

He smiles when looking back to him.

"How long have you been without doing it?"

"One month."

"From Portugal?!"

Kostyantyn doesn’t answer; he just remembers the last time, the last victim, the last sip of pleasure advancing in slow motion down his throat, that coming from that beautiful young girl who, on the verge of death, only for this and his arrival had been able to pray…

The street lights, the closest ones, blink; Artem drives without further delay.

"I will not let you go, Kostya. We're going for a victim  _now_."

That's the problem, Kostyantyn thinks.

Now, there’s only  _one_  indicated victim. Just one.

Nikita.

Nikita and his voice painting a thousand and one colours in front of his eyes, transporting him to a world full of roses, rain and love.

Nikita looking at him in the drizzle, vulnerable, fragile, beautiful like no other existing human being.

Nikita and his warm cheek in contact with his cold finger while his eyes nothing but anguish were roaring.

Nikita and the shudder that, with a simple caress, he caused in the most sensitive fibers of his inhumanity.

... Nikita squeezing him against his body, clinging with obsession to his back as his life, slowly but hopelessly, leaves him forever.

He trembles when imagining the last. He massages his forehead to calm down. The contradiction that temptation generates is not yet entirely comprehensible to him.

It should be soon, perhaps before resolving his outstanding matters.

"That guy," Artem says, stopping the car on a corner and pointing to the man standing three meters from there, in front of an abandoned factory in the suburbs of Kiev. About forty-five years old, grey-haired, but in healthy shape, dark-eyed, checking his cell phone with some impatience; because of his attitude, lonely in the street at such high hours of the night, it’s evident that he waits for someone for particular reasons. "He's in the list, he cheated a lot of people. Apparently, he comes here to see his customers."

Kostyantyn sighs. What he hates the most about being who he is, precisely, is what he loves the most. The pleasure of taking human lives with nothing can be compared, and even if he knows that if a person is in the  _network_ 's list it’s because that person expects a punishment or a redemption, at the same time he will always blame himself.

Who they are to choose who lives and who doesn’t?

But hunger corrupts him. Yes, as always, as is evidenced by the street lights when it blinks in spectral gesture; hunger is the energy which drags him out of the car, which makes him run at supernatural speed, which makes him take the victim in his arms in a insane movement to rise above the buildings that surround them in a jump and, thus, fall linked on the roof of the factory.

"Who are you?!" the victim asks wrapped in a furious despair, lying beneath him and with him between his legs, cornering him.

"Death," Kostyantyn responds without reveal any emotion, by embracing him as the most intimate lover, to stroke the neck with his lips and nail his sharp fangs right there.

He sucks it; how inevitable it’s to moan while doing so as he feels the warmth of the blood descending through his body to the rhythm of the most visceral satisfaction. More when he closes his eyes and loses himself in enjoyment, when he swears that the man in his arms is not that scammer, but the angel with the perfect voice.

He tries to deceive reality, he does it while he groans when he sucks: the cries of a man transform into the cries of a boy, the sighs of purity, the sings of supplication.

"Kostyantyn…" he swears that Nikita says to him with the same purity that with his songs expresses, "please, please…"

The supplication makes him move his hips forward and squeeze with more possession the body, mixes the instincts of what he was with the instincts of what he is. He feels what he imagines, he does it with unbearable clarity when his nails press his victim's chest until his clothes and skin are pierced: Nikita hugs him, squeezes him, and in a gasp of explicit pleasure begs once.

"Please, Kostyantyn…" Nikita moans of his imagination against his ear, embedded in the arms of death, "take me."

* * *

 

_"Kill me…!"_

* * *

 

As he swallows the last drop of blood, he snarls, dropping the lifeless body. Agitated, he licks his lips while holding his chest, overloaded with the obscenest joy. Artem arrives and does the usual thing, clearing evidence according to the recommendations of the  _network_. How much he needed to _feed_ himself, Kostyantyn discovers.

How much he yearns for the next to be the one who, unfortunately, may will never be.

Artem observes him: at the edge of the roof, Kiev looks cold and lonely this midnight that says goodbye to Wednesday and welcomes Thursday.

"I will not get involved in your affairs," says Artem, whose eyes only to the sky can observe, "but don’t forget that you will not be able to control yourself, not if you…"

Kostyantyn knows it first-hand. He’s disappointed to hear Artem, Artem that all history knows, to say something similar; he understands that he says it with affection and without any bad intention; for that reason and for nothing else he accepts it.

"I will never forget it," he promises.

Although, frankly, he doesn’t feel secure anymore. Of what he feels, what he wants, what he needs, what he doesn’t.

He only knows that he wants what he has imagined, the perfect image and the perfect feeling. Nikita's voice panting in his ear as he feels the hot blood expand through his body in a sublime and wonderful exaltation of all existing passions merged into one, the best.

Perfect, like the voice that has achieved what nobody else.

Get there, exactly there.

Where Kostyantyn believed, since his  _birth_ , that there was nothing left.

 

**...**

 

" _I live in you; and you would die for me._ " he repeats for the umpteenth time.

He looks at _Carmilla_ open on the only table he has in his apartment; he has already finished it, but he’s reading it again. He has already read Polidori's _The_ _Vampyre_ too, while, on the TV, Louis has no strength to live in _Interview_ _with_ _the_ _Vampire_.

Is he going crazy, really?

It's obvious: Kostyantyn is one of those young gothics who read too many horror stories and think of themselves as vampires, or else any fetishist looking for people to suck blood from to quench their perversion. To him, who has no attraction for…! It’s a delirium.

There can be no reality in this myth.

It’s absurd to be watching the movie again and again, by which he turns it off by pressing the red button on the remote control. In his song, he remembers, Kostyantyn gave him a childish warning overflowing with cynicism, something like "I'll tear you apart because I'm a vampire, Nikita." The same as when he told him he was going to recommend books to convince him. Yes, these are the delusions of a Quixote dressed in black and with white makeup that almost makes him look like a mime.

But why had the wind caused  _Carmilla_  to fall?

Why was the light blinking?

But why…?

"Coincidences," he concludes aloud while closing _Carmilla_. The silence is pronounced around his body; although he longs to believe what he said, he can’t, not at all.

Several times on different days,  _Carmilla_  between hundreds of different titles. 

Why?

Kostyantyn hasn’t returned to the bookstore after what happened in that corner, although the vertigo has never finished leaving him since then; with more or less power, he has felt it every night, in every street, every time his eyes close and only the darkness he sees. Today, the following Sunday, Nikita isn’t willing to go to the bar. If possible, he will never go again; to do so would be to insist with something that, although it fills his heart with love, also hurts him, because it’s nothing more than a futile insistence and a momentary consolation, like having casual sex one night and then returning to a loneliness that it knows burn from the inside, things for which someone like him, with the heart so hurt in the chest, will never work.

Maybe, to find new horizons, he can take advantage of the savings he has in a new activity. He can study Spanish, a language that he appreciates thanks to those beautiful summers in Murcia during his childhood, or to retake Marketing, he was so close to graduation! He can travel, know neighbouring countries, or go as far as possible, to Asia, to South America. Or he can fulfil his dream of seeing Red Hot Chili Peppers live in California.

Yes, he can make all that.

He smiles with more longing to give himself encouragement than by some feeling similar to happiness: he goes to his stereo and, faithful to the custom he has been carrying since childhood, when MP3 were just emerging and Spotify wasn’t even a possibility, he places a CD of the Chili Peppers in the reader. _Blood Sugar Sex Magik_ ; perfection.

He sinks into his bed while listening to 'Under the bridge' in loop. The same song since he has use of reason, the same song saying the same thing, talking about the unbearable loneliness - the one that isn’t sought, but is always found - that, throughout his life and as a ghost, has stalked him. And it’s, to listen to it again, a confirmation of what he feels: he’s a rodent running on his wheel, running and running, moving forward, but in circles that nowhere take him.

He has returned to the site from which he has never left: he’s alone. With his heart overflowing with love, but alone.

Cries on the pillow holding it tightly with his hands, because the loneliness that Anthony Kiedis describes so poetically is what has always overwhelmed him, the same, traced.

Not even with Kiev he feels identified.

Nothing is left without music and with no ability to do everything that has occurred to him he feels.

Kostyantyn is just a delirium and the light blinked by the same accident for which  _Carmilla_  and no other book fell. That’s why they will never will _understand_ each other. No one will understand him.

Never!

He gets up; still cries. Sings out loud, yells over Anthony's voice all he feels. It's already nine o'clock, time at which he’s usually at the bar; he’s trapped in this apartment that symbolizes everything that he doesn’t want and turns on his own axis without any ability to escape. He’s alone, sunk in deep water, and nothing can get him out of there.

The light from the street, the one that comes through the window, blinks.

He slows down. Trembling, falls to the ground on his knees. He no longer listens to Anthony Kiedis sing, he no longer has the capacity to hear him, no matter how much he continues repeating the same words without ceasing; he can only look at the street light like this, on.

He can only wonder how much is delirium and how much is reality.

Determined to investigate, fed up with the assumptions, the phrases, the warnings, he goes abruptly to the door of his apartment. He goes down the eight floors that separate him from the street, and when he reaches the ground floor he runs out. With a cloth coat is not enough protected from the cold that refers more to winter than the current fall, but it doesn’t matter.

Nothing does, except the confirmation that he needs so badly from the twisted world that he can’t bear to contemplate anymore.

Walks to the edge of the path on the street, down the drizzle that falls softly on his body. He trembles because of the cold, he embraces himself, but he does it, above all, because of what he perceives without even looking.

Knowing what will happen, he looks to the left from one second to the other, straight to the shadows where nothing seems to be: Kostyantyn takes a step backwards.

Nikita holds the tears, angry: he has reached the final point. He can’t even confirm that this boy exists, he has no way of doing it.

Perhaps, he imagined even the audience applauding him.

Because everything may be part of the same delirium, of the same hallucination.

Because Kostyantyn will never _understand_ him.

"Why does the light blink?" Nikita asks hugging himself.

Kostyantyn gives forward the step that, before, has given back. He’s pleasantly surprised by Nikita's high degree of perception, by how he has realized his presence and the relationship of this with the incessant blink that accompanies the powerful _shadows_ that know how to move through the darkness. Although it seems silly, he knows well that not everyone notices it.

He himself, thirty-two years ago, didn’t do it.

Temptation, having Nikita so exposed and defenceless before his eyes, is almost intolerable. However, reigns the feeling that so well had overwhelmed his thoughts when he heard him sang that time in the bar.

Kostyantyn smiles, although he doesn’t mock, nor underestimate the situation; he is fully touched by the angel that’s before his eyes, that angel whom is afraid, vulnerable.

Perfect.

"Do you want to know, Nikita?" he asks.

He agrees. In his eyes, Kostyantyn notices a subtle outbreak of fear, although more palpable is the anguish, the despair, the fury, and something else that he can’t decipher.

Something that, although it’s indecipherable, at the same time it seems disturbingly familiar.

"Cover yourself, this cold could make you sick," Kostyantyn says then, "I'll wait for you here, we'll go to the bar and we'll talk. It's okay?"

Stepping back, keeping prudent distances, Nikita returns to where he came from. Five minutes later, Kostyantyn has him in front of him with a long, thick coat and a scarf around his neck, ready to walk through the cold Kiev next to him.

"Come on," Kostyantyn proposes with sudden shyness.

Without further ado, they walk.

Not a word is pronounced, nor a noise occurs. The only thing that Kostyantyn hears, besides the steps, is Nikita's agitated breathing, perhaps in that state for everything that his eyes scream. Within Nikita, however, the reason is disbelief.

Does he  _exist_? Kostyantyn exists or he has already lost all the screws?

Walking at a steady pace, Kostyantyn looks at the Kiev that’s in front of him. It’s not Odessa, his beloved Odessa, but it’s still Ukraine, the country that has longed for so long and for so many reasons. He has wandered around the world, he has lived in every corner of the planet, but no place will be this. But how far away he feels Ukraine from what he knew in the past, when he was still alive inside his veins.

Not like now.

Now, death in the form of other's blood, the fate of the  _shadows_  that roam among mortals, is the only thing that he contains in the body.

Or so he thought before meeting Nikita.

Or so he thought before listening to his voice of an angel bellowing pain and impotence. The voice that has achieved what nothing else could in the last thirty- two years, when the  _curse_  fell upon him in the midst of the sweetest deception.

Remind him that, although he’s no longer the symbol of a life lying within a body, his heart still exists conceptually in the deepest waters of his being. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading!
> 
> I left some loose data about all the background that I invented for this story after reading several articles and based on my own obsession with the vampire genre. Although this is nothing more than an RPF, perhaps this would be the only opportunity in my life of writing a story about vampires considering that, as an author of originals, I write about other genres that have nothing to do with this (or a little, because, well, erotism… XD). I'm giving the taste to my inner teenager, and to do it I want to do it the best I can despite my lack of talent.
> 
> But I work hard, I swear! XD
> 
> So, excuse me if everything sounds very absurd. In the second half, which will start in about five or six more chapters, I think (?), I'm going to get more into these issues.
> 
> And, yes, Artem is a vampire too. XD
> 
> There aren’t many characters "of reality" in this story, only the villain, whom I have kept under seven keys until the time to show him.
> 
> Spoiler Alert: he may had participated in Eurovision… XD
> 
> Pinkphoeniixx, Blake, Kostya Anon: thanks for supporting me so much. Seriously, thank you very much with my heart and my soul. I know this is not the greatest thing, but it helps me to smile this difficult year of my life. So, thanks for being with me.
> 
> Thank you very much for reading to all of you. :')


	5. IV

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The talk flows, but where's taking them?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading. Thanks a lot and forever. ♥

**IV**

 

They arrive at the bar and occupy together the table where Nikita always sits, next to the stage, at the right end of it. They leave the coats behind the chairs, although Nikita keeps the scarf.

Kostyantyn notes the erratic behaviour of his companion. Although he doesn’t express it at the level in which Nikita does it, however, he feels similar somehow. Because nothing in his attitude may seem erratic, but within his conceptual heart there’s too much dispersed content that he hasn’t ordered yet, not as he should before this talk.

He needs a little more time.

He was at the door of his building thinking of seeing him from a distance, seeing him at least for a moment in order to define himself, to make the pertinent decisions and solve the dilemma that has denied him the ability to think about anything else.

Because, from the caress of the cold finger on the warm cheek, the inner universe of Kostyantyn spins around Nikita in two different directions, but equally powerful.

He didn’t intend to announce himself, to be noticed, but when he saw how the hour progressed, he began to lose control: he felt that, because of the caress in communion with the words about _understanding_ , he had made an unintentional damage. Perhaps he had scared him, perhaps the caress had passed a limit and for that reason Nikita didn’t leave to the bar; everything what he didn’t want it, ruined by a caress he had not been able to avoid giving away.

When he saw Nikita at the door, defenceless and disturbed, he couldn’t help making this invitation; he wanted nothing more than to have one more minute, one more second to do what he had passionately done in each encounter, to absorb from every moment a sublime gratification, to bring those feelings full of dust to a light capable of cleaning him, to a sensation capable to revive him conceptually beyond the heart. He needs to think fast and now.

Define if he wants his voice, company and warmth than his blood, or vice versa.

"Order something to drink, I invite you," he says thinking, maybe, in relax him.

The talk, if it flows as he thinks it can flow, will be long.

Nikita, holding one hand with the other on his lap in order to seek calm and stop the tremor, sees in the request the ideal opportunity.

He calls the waiter, a young man who surely ranges between the age they both have, between twenty and twenty-five, with dreadlocks in his hair, piercings in his mouth, nose, eyebrow, and several ones in the ears too. Nikita asks for a coffee decided to not to drink any alcohol, needing to be alert.

"And you?" the waiter asks to Kostyantyn.

This one, of course given his nature, shakes his head and keeps spying on Nikita: why does he look so suddenly surprised?

When the waiter leaves, Kostyantyn rests his hands on the table and criss-crosses his fingers. He plays with his hands to calm the anxiety that he feels for the situation, for the person, for the environment and for the temptation in which he sinks him. For the self-control that needs to be maintained in order to decide.

"You exist," he listens.

He observes Nikita under the violet lights of the bar. That’s why he’s surprised? Kostyantyn laughs softly.

"Why did you think that I don’t exist?" he asks with some mischief, almost as if he were flirting.

"Because that would make a lot of sense," replies Nikita, serious and cold, too different from the one he knew on stage, that angel so overflowing with feelings. With a frown and latent anguish, Nikita doesn’t hesitate: "Why the light blink?"

Kostyantyn releases a sigh before opening up himself as he may never have done, not in this _second_ life, not with a human.

Less with an angel.

"Because all the people have energy, each of those present; beings like me, on the other hand, have _another_ kind of energy, no stronger as if we were superheroes or something, but of _another_ nature. When something doesn’t allow us to keep that nature under control, the environment is affected."

"Beings like you?"

The question is obvious, the most expected considering what Kostyantyn has just said. However, he knows that it’s not prudent to respond with the truth, not for the moment.

"Beings like me, yes."

Kostyantyn smiles. Suddenly, talking coquettishly seems entertaining. Maybe it's not the right thing to do, not considering the stress that Nikita has, but how he can’t do it? This is the closest that he has been to a date - in the most human sense of the concept - in thirty-two years.

Nikita, tired of everything and too restless to contain the tremor that has taken hold of his hands, decides that he doesn’t like Kostyantyn’s gaze: for him, it seems that this is a game.

For Nikita, stressed, it’s the opposite.

"Listen," he says to Kostyantyn after thanking the coffee that the waiter brings to him and putting on it a single envelope of sugar, "if you're one of those weird guys who dress in black and think they're vampires just because they hear The Sisters of Mercy or one of those Gothic groups from the past, stop underestimating me: I'm not stupid enough to believe any of that."

Kostyantyn, who has a cheek resting on one hand and his elbow on the table, frees a huge laugh. If he were human, he would drink a glass of wine to properly enjoy the moment.

This is fantastic, so much that it almost costs him to believe it.

Meanwhile, in the conceptual heart, the balance begins to tilt without him noticing it.

"I don’t underestimate you, Nikita," Kostyantyn says with full confidence, "on the contrary. I mean… You have noticed the detail of the light and you have also noticed my presence more than once. Don’t you think that you have more reasons to suspect of the coincidences so stuck, and therefore suspicious, than to take me for a Goth who has lost his mind for listening to The Sisters of Mercy and reading Sheridan Le Fanu?"

Nikita leans back, stunned. Technically, Kostyantyn has right: he brought up the subject of light, and that detail, so rigorously punctual every time that Kostyantyn appears, can’t be coincidental.

Nor the feeling of vertigo knowing that he’s fixedly observed when he walks down the street every damn night, as if a black hole absorbed him from the heights and sucked him with the sole intention of making him falter.

However, Kostyantyn could be taking advantage of the details that he himself has noticed, some born of chance that for Nikita isn’t entirely consistent but not impossible, to describe better his fantasy.

He shouldn’t tell him how _Carmilla_ got into his hands.

... And then it's as if Kostyantyn reads his mind:

"Besides, who do you think that threw you _Carmilla_ that night? Beings like me can do it also, see what isn’t before our eyes, move what we want to our whim. Oh, and let's not forget about the wind… A pretty dramatic detail, to give emphasis! It's part of our power, Nikita. Of our supernatural abilities."

Nikita leans back so far and so violently that a couple of presents turn to see him. Kostyantyn sees the horror in his eyes, not as a glimpse but as a whole.

"It's not possible…" he whispers, incredulous.

Kostyantyn crosses his arms on the table and bends, inciting, towards Nikita, who hasn’t taken a sip of coffee and trembles like a leaf lost in the wind.

How not to tremble, thinks Nikita by his side, if Kostyantyn knows _everything_?

"Do you want to know if it's possible?" Kostyantyn asks with a fixed, engulfing gaze, two unequal coloured anchors clutching him to the chair in pursuit of holding him back. "Nikita, I didn’t see you for the first time when you sang Sofia's song…"

"What?"

A few blows on the microphone interrupt the dialogue: is the small and pretty girl of each week, again on stage.

"Good evening," she says with her always latent charm. She’s shy, sweet, "today I will sing another Eurovision song, that one from last year… I think that O. Torvald's 'Time' was underrated and I would like to pay homage to it with a piano version arranged by myself."

Without further ado, she starts playing a slower but no less dark version of the original.

" _Slow down, give me some time_ …"

There’s a trance between the unequal eyes and those that are not. Neither one nor the other continues the dialogue; the only thing that they hear is the voice of the girl singing that Eurovision song with a talent that isn’t outstanding, but notorious. The two minds, the human and the non-human, shoot thoughts into the air by contacting the opposite pair of eyes; they think, without knowing it, in the same. They also think about the opposite.

“ _Time… to look into your eyes_!”

Kostyantyn squeezes one hand with the other: Nikita's gaze is the most dangerous thing he has crossed. He’s excessive in the sadness that he transmits, one that only gives signs of what attracted him the first time. He smiles when he remembers it, and in Nikita he only deepens the trance starred by fear.

It was in his return in thirty-two years, after the _curse_ fell on him. It was his first time in Ukraine after independence, his first night devoted to reuniting with everything he had ever loved.

He had decided to start with Kiev and not Odessa for _him_ , the one with whom he has outstanding issues and who, as he has been able to deduce with the little information that he has spent the last two years collecting from different points of the planet, seems to be near here. But that was for the next night: that night, he was going to walk through Kiev, he was going to pretend to be able to breathe in Kiev, he was going to feel against the coldness of his skin a different Kiev that, at the same time, was as always.

Ukraine, his home.

Too concentrated he was on that to pay attention to humans; well fed as he was, because just the night before, in Portugal, he had taken his last victim, he didn’t need blood to survive. However, it was enough to walk towards the shop window to feel it.

He stopped in the shadows to perceive the low, sad, dark energy of the book seller.

Stealthily, on the other side of the window, Kostyantyn gave himself a single second to observe him: he was the most beautiful human being he had ever seen, a statement that could sound exaggerated to anyone, but of which he was sure in a single instant.

He continued walking, stopped at the corner, on the roof of a building, and when the boy left he followed him from a distance and from the shadows, moving with amazing skill for roofs and walls.

Yes: he was the most beautiful human being he had ever seen.

In both lives.

Missed by the low energy he felt and understanding what that detail could mean thanks to his vampiric nature, he followed him every night, an inappropriate behaviour between humans, aggressive and disrespectful, but which for a hunting vampire constituted a large part of his nature.

The curious detail was that, precisely: he, always devoted to the victims that the _network_ facilitated him, had never felt the need to hunt anyone, not in that way, following him through roofs and walls, observing him from the darkest shadows every night.

Soon, when he watched him waiting to cross an avenue on the eighth night, Kostyantyn knew that what was happening to him was what Artem, while he was educating him after the _curse_ , had explained:

"Sometimes, nothing is able to explain why we choose one human and not another; it depends on each _shadow_. Some seek beauty, other diverse fragrances, others some kind of energy, others satiate some kind of perversion. Some use seduction, others act like the monsters that used to represent us in the first literature, others are as wild as beasts or as soft as teenagers in love, but something is for sure: we _choose_ them, yes, but in fact it’s that particular detail of them who _chooses_ us. The day you feel this, Kostya, you will feel seduced as the most fervent lover: you will want nothing more than to tie to that human and kill him to reach the most supreme ecstasy."

Watching him waiting to cross the street, Kostyantyn knew that he was feeling it for the first time. And it was for the beauty, yes, but above all for the energy.

For the sadness that the energy bled.

The _network_ is rigorous, much more than other groups and orders that he had known across the world; it’s also one of the most effective and organized. The acceptable victims, on one hand, are the sick and also the volunteers, people who long to end their lives for different reasons and to whom their desire is fulfilled without delay; on the other hand, are the criminals, those whom the laws fail to catch or those with they prefer to take more direct actions, which is why justice apparatuses such as that of Ukraine and others throughout Europe entrust that information to whom call _shadows_.

However, _shadows_ know their nature: sometimes, they need to _choose_ their victim according to their own needs, tastes and desires, just as Artem had explained; an open secret that serves as a relief more akin to their perverse nature contained in order to survive in today's society.

Kostyantyn hasn’t allowed it for thirty-two years, which is why Artem tends to make fun of him. But when he saw Nikita that night, when he saw him so many other nights, when he allowed himself to follow him every night on his way to his apartment, he couldn’t help it.

He felt it in the air, he sensed it with his supernatural senses: Nikita, by his energy barely palpable in the air, warned him that his sadness was a plea, that he only wanted to die.

If he wanted to, why not…?

He’s supposed to have returned to Ukraine only to solve old issues, those that will always be related to _him_ ; he has distracted himself in this silent hunt, in seeking the right moment to attack him and grant him his wish, almost as if he were an angel of death, Mélovin, the exact form in which he conceived himself every time he kills to survive in this fictitious eternal life.

And not.

One night of many, he followed him to this same bar; great was his surprise to see him go on stage for the first time.

An epiphany was to hear him sing.

The reality changed; other colours, ones that he didn’t remember seeing in thirty-two years, manifested around him. It wasn’t the colours of the voice, the fluctuations, the changes in the tone; it was, above all, the excessive emotion that the voice transmitted, when it sounded suffocated at the end of each phrase, not because of lack of air but because of the intensity of the transmitted.

It was the will to live.

He knew that he couldn’t kill him, that he didn’t want to. How to kill him, if he didn’t want to die? How to be the angel of death, if the real angel was him when he sang like that? The contradiction pursues him until today: nothing longs more to kill him, than to build the perfect scene to drink to the last drop while, in an intimate embrace, Nikita begs him to do it; nothing craves more than to listen to him once more, to wake him up and show him that he has too many reasons to continue with his life, because that voice only deserves to be heard.

He wants him as a victim as he has never wanted another, with a delirium that’s as voracious as erotic, as disgust as pleasant. But he can’t.

Not if he's an angel.

Not if he has _that_ voice.

When the girl finishes, everyone present applauds her, all but them. Kostyantyn, without needing to blink, doesn’t even try to disguise it; there’s no way. With _Carmilla_ , he knows he has said enough to install the belief in Nikita. But has he done it in the right way? He doesn’t know, it’s his first time. He has never revealed clues of his inhumanity to a human before.

What will Nikita be thinking?

He suspects it when looking at him and, without knowing it for sure, suspects well: Nikita is in shock.

 _Why does he do this to me_ …? Nikita wonders again and again. To him, who feels lonely; to him, who has already lost all hope; to him, who nobody has near, who has lost everything even before starting.

Why does he tell him that he will understand him, why does he say that if Kostyantyn is…?

Nikita looks down: it’s his impression, or does Kostyantyn not blink? He squeezes his hands hard, rocking himself and feeling like the most imbecile of human beings.

When Kostyantyn rubs his knee with one hand, where no one at the bar will notice the caress, Nikita feels a chill go through him. It's like a lightning, really.

"Why did you lie to me…?" he asks in a whisper, unable to remove Kostyantyn's hand from his knee.

Without wishing to withdraw him, rather.

Kostyantyn only squeezes his knee, as if in doing so he tried to offer some kind of support to Nikita. It doesn’t take him long to realize that he has not had contact with humans for thirty-two years, not beyond the contact between the monster and the victim. Artem, Mother and some other people in the _network_ have been his only contacts, the only ones with whom he has shared something beyond the obvious, a deep, sincere, real bond.

He has forgotten what it feels like to be human.

When analysing the question with the intention of answering it, Kostyantyn understands that the deepening of his inhumanity compared to his humanity has done nothing but ruin everything.

When the balance is tilted violently inside the conceptual heart, when it’s the voice that yearns and not the blood, he caresses once more the knee, desperate.

He has used Mélovin to approach someone whom only Kostya could.

"I didn’t lie to you," he answers.

"You said that maybe you could _understand_ me, that maybe I could _understand_ you… Do you have any idea how stupid that sounds? You're telling me you're a vampire and…! "Nikita rubs his face to sort his thoughts; he can’t. The hand on the knee, the eyes that don’t blink, the light that did it and _Carmilla_ always perched on the table: he's fed up. Fed up!

He doesn’t want to be alone anymore! He doesn’t want _anything_ anymore!

 _Anything_!

He doesn’t want to do what, suddenly, he has understood that he has done: to cling to the interest that someone seems to show for him in order to leave behind the loneliness that devours him from the inside. Have someone with whom to share something, with whom to smile, with whom to relate.

Someone who gives him back the hope that only he, and for himself, must recover.

He has been excited about the appearance of Kostyantyn in his life, he discovers. And it turns out that Kostyantyn is…

How will _understand_ someone like that…?

"You approached me because of your absurd ideas…" Nikita whispers, sad, and who exposes himself in this way destroys the heart that only by feeding on human lives pumps blood, "not because of what you said when you heard my voice…"

Listening to him, Kostyantyn feels that a stake is stuck in his heart.

Yes, he has spent too much time away from humanity, so much that he no longer understands them, so much that he has no way of respecting them.

"Nikita…" he whispers, and with his hand caresses the knee once more.

Nothing, nor the gesture that tries to comfort, manages to erase the sadness of the dark and devastated eyes of who sees him.

Kostyantyn can’t stand it anymore: Nikita doesn’t realize what he transmits, he’s resplendent without knowing it, and it’s that detail that seduces him the most. As a vampire, as a murderer, as a supernatural being.

As Kostya, his last vestige of humanity.

"Then…" Kostyantyn whispers.

 "Tell me why you follow me…" Nikita says before Kostyantyn's eyes, too far gone to face the situation reasonably.

Kostyantyn calls the waiter. He pays for his coffee, leaves an excellent tip and stands up.

"Better outside," he says, unable to keep calm: the light will blink at any moment.

He’s too seduced, too hungry and excited, like a _shadow_ and like what he was once.

Human.

Nikita agrees for only one reason: there’s no return. It has to be today, not tomorrow; he needs to know what the hell is happening. Although he’s still in shock, even though he’s not able to reason out the dangers of walking near this strange boy of unknown intentions, he can no longer bear it.

On leaving, they walk three blocks in silence, Kostyantyn by his side, never a step ahead or behind. Nikita thinks about asking him why, in demanding an answer, and pushing him, and beating him, and retaliate all the anguish that hangs him, but soon Kostyantyn makes a gesture with one of his white hands.

Nikita stops, perplexed.

He watches how Kostyantyn moves towards the corner of a small street. Brakes before the lamppost and only then faces him again.

Kostyantyn closes his eyes in a gesture of concentration; it's time to prove it. When the light blinks, he smiles, although there’s no charm in his smile.

There’s emptiness.

Nikita observes Kostyantyn like a sick man lost in a nightmare, paralyzed for what he sees, the eerie image of the light blinking around that boy with eyes empty of life. Because that's how they look, empty.

Empty as he believes himself since he understood that singing was an escape and not his destiny.

Kostyantyn raises a hand in a showy, elegant movement, with an open palm before the disturbed Nikita; the light stops blinking instantly when the hand executes the movement.

Provocative and ghostly between light and darkness, Kostyantyn shows his teeth in a smile that bristles Nikita into the deep.

It's still a perfect smile.

It’s still as pleasant as it’s disgust.

"Do you need more evidence?"

Nikita doesn’t notice it, but not only his hands are trembling; it’s his whole body. It’s everything that he feels and that he is.

Containing the weeping that shock and terror beg him to shed, feeling how fear seizes his heart and spreads like a virus by his mere existence, he embraces himself.

"Why?" he asks in a thin tremulous voice, sunk in the unreality that the image of Kostyantyn smiling before his eyes suggests.

"'Why' what?" Kostyantyn asks. The euphoria is excessive; the fear that he can smell in Nikita seduces even the obscenest of the _shadow_ that he is, that side of himself that, suddenly, he has no ability to control.

"Why you follow me…?"

Kostyantyn notices the excessive trembling of Nikita's body: before him, he hugs himself and fear barely allows him to stand.

But in his eyes, he discovers, it lies the same desire to live.

The smile, then, abandons him.

"Because I _chose_ you," he whispers, serious, no more coquetry, no more grace or theatricality.

Speaking as Kostyantyn, not like the mask he used to call 'Mélovin' when he was alive, the mask that now allows him to be who he is, the vampire in the most bloodthirsty of the concept.

Not the human being who has fought so hard to banish of his system, Kostya, the same one who he secretly yearns for every damn night.

"For what?" Nikita asks in a thin voice again, on the verge of losing support due to the extreme intensity of the situation.

Kostyantyn smiles barely; wanting it or not, his interests in contradiction or not, he must _do_ it.

Nikita sees, in a flash, the purity he had noticed the first time, with _Carmilla_ between them, in the bookstore that dark night.

"Forgive me, but I can’t explain it to you here," Kostyantyn says. "Do you want to come with me wherever I can…?”

"What?"

"Do you trust me?"

And Kostyantyn extends his hand to him. Nikita looks at him as if he were looking at a dark door at the end of a long corridor in the middle of a horror movie. Something inside him tells him that he shouldn’t, that maybe this guy is crazy and everything is coincidence, that it’s him who has something wrong in the head and for that is inventing all this; another part of him, however, knows that everything that’s happening, however incredible it may seem, is real.

As real as the longing to take Kostyantyn's hand and let him to take him anywhere.

To don’t be alone.

To jump blindfolded into the abyss of the unknown.

He swallows: is precisely what he wanted while listening to Anthony Kiedis sing, or not? This, something new, break the wheel to stop running in circles, free of the nonsense that’s his life without music or dreams after leaving the deep water in which he’s trapped.

Don’t be alone anymore, yes…

Looks at Kostyantyn's outstretched hand: why should he trust a stranger who looks rather delusional? When looking for the unequal eyes, a burning look collides with his.

Burning, so much that, as it happened to Laura with Carmilla, the look manages to scare him.

Trembling in despair, he holds his hand. Kostyantyn smiles with tenderness.

"Thank you," he says, and Nikita sees the street lights explode and then vanish. When a scream struggles to come out of his throat, his eyes blind before his own destiny, a hand as cold as ice covers his mouth. He fights, battles against the hand that keeps him silent and against the arm that surrounds his waist, he does it clinging to the chest against which his body seems to travel. The body isn’t normal; it’s as hard as a statue. He feels, later, how the wind hits his face.

He collides with what looks like a wall and everything, around them, is muted.

When he observes the surroundings, discovers that it’s a column of the terrace of a building, one that separates him from a fall that, from such a height, could be lethal.

Tries to scream for the impression, again, but the hand made of ice continues censoring his voice. And when the arm that surrounds his waist releases it, the eyes are the ones that stop him: Nikita has his back attached to the column that behind him is built, and next to his back are his hands, motionless.

Fights to get free.

The eyes, literally, don’t leave him.

"Calm down…" Kostyantyn asks with a smile that, despite the horror that Nikita contemplates, continues to look sweet, pure, honest.

Nikita screams inside his mouth, disconcerted, until he notices, through the frantic blinking of a single light on the terrace, one located next to the door that communicates with the rest of the building, the white, gleaming, sharp fangs that peek through the mouth of the one who holds him. Kostyantyn is leaning towards him; because of the height difference, the mouth is above his eyes. Kostyantyn's breath should be hitting his pupils.

There’s nothing.

He gives up; Nikita stops trying to scream or trying to escape. On the column he keeps the back; only then Kostyantyn leaves his mouth free. At the same time, the eyes stop exercising force on his body.

"You don’t breathe…" Nikita murmurs, terrified and suffocated. "You are not breathing…"

Kostyantyn, always serious, nods.

"Beings like me don’t need to breathe, not for what beings like you need it," he responds.

"So…"

Kostyantyn holds him ardently from his cheeks. By sticking to his body, he tilts his face upwards, raising his chin with special delicacy. Looking to each other like this, Nikita from below, Kostyantyn from above, is the latter who speaks:

"I’m a _shadow_ , what humans, for literature, call vampires."

Nikita's eyes open so, so much, that Kostyantyn is delighted by what the closeness allows him to notice, the detail of each eyelash, the shape of the pupils, the exact colour of the eyes.

No fails: he’s a work of art.

Such is the delight that Kostyantyn get lost in his own speech. It’s not until he notices tears emerge from Nikita's lower eyelids that he recalls that, indeed, he was giving an explanation:

"I know what you feel; I felt it too," he says. "Discovering that _shadows_ exist isn’t easy, not for an ordinary person in the ordinary world, all of you, people who ignore everything that happens in the dark."

"And why are you telling me this…?" Nikita asks in a sharp voice.

Mélovin tries to impose himself on Kostya; the vampire tries to speak about the human; Kostyantyn, the one that contains both, manages to triumph over each one.

He has to be honest:

"Because, the first time that I saw you, I _chose_ you to kill you."

Nikita feels how the disgust cuts his breath. Then, this is it? Isn’t something else? Isn’t the _understanding_?

Is still loneliness…?

"That's why you follow me…" Nikita whispers, and it’s when he hears himself that he notices at which level the desolation reaches him.

Kostyantyn nods.

"Since I saw you at the bookstore one night being Louis before Lestat, with your eyes lost in the nothing, wishing to die but without deciding to end your life… Yes, I _chose_ you to kill you."

Nikita breaks into a disconsolate crying. Kostyantyn knows everything, understands absolutely everything.

Perhaps even more than Nikita himself believes he understands.

"Is that the reason why you _chose_ me?"

"That's why I _chose_ you."

"For…"

"To make you a favour."

The disgust leaves Nikita; what chokes him, now, besides the ghostly fixity of Kostyantyn's unequal eyes, is the sadness, the one that he doesn’t identify inside his heart in the midst of the shock that embraces him, but that he detects every time he says a word.

"But that was before you made yourself noticed, right…?"

Another demonstration of perception by Nikita. Kostyantyn smiles with subtlety, almost with respect.

"Because I hadn’t heard you sing."

Nikita pours more and more tears. What does that mean?

"And that has to do with…?"

The smile expands a bit. Nikita is too hard with himself.

That he doesn’t realize not only seduces Kostyantyn; it annihilates him.

"When I heard you sing Sofia's song, I realized that no, I couldn’t take you as my victim."

"Why not?"

"Because you weren’t like Louis, who surrendered to Lestat because he wanted to die to free himself from grief; you wanted to live."

"Huh…?"

Kostyantyn's smile expands itself because of the tenderness: Nikita's eyes will lose him.

They will do it.

Or already…?

"What I saw when I met you through the window was a lie; you want to live, Nikita. That's why I stopped. That's why I decided to give you _Carmilla_ , to give you a clue about who I’m."

"With what intentions…?"

Kostyantyn sinks his cold fingers under Nikita's eyes. He cleans the tears, one by one, scatters them and dries them, until there’s none left. Looking at him as delighted as before with the eyelashes, the pupils and the colour of the eyes, he says what’s very clear in his conceptual heart:

"Don’t be your own rose, Nikita; you are rejecting what you are, an artist, and you are condemning yourself to an unhappiness that your talent doesn’t deserve. What I want to say is…!"

Tears, new tears, fall again on Nikita's face. Kostyantyn keeps quiet from one second to another, enraptured even with the brightness that the tears give to the beautiful face leaning towards him.

"No…" Nikita whispers. His arms are fallen on each side of his body; his legs are held by the grip that Kostyantyn exerts on his wet cheeks. "It's late."

Nikita's words manage to disturb Kostyantyn more of what he believes, from what he perceives to himself. He watches him like that, languid before him, crying silent tears, one after another, indefinite tears that are suddenly two invincible waterfalls.

"Why do you say that it's late?"

"Because I give up…"

And not only with music, Kostyantyn discovers.

In front of him, Nikita is surrendered in body and soul.

The temptation to kill him seizes him when his vampiric instinct takes over: nothing seduces more to a _shadow_ than to have a victim surrendered in his arms, tied to his cold body, ready to give his neck to death. Kostyantyn fights against his own hands, against the hunger that makes blink savagely not one, but all the lights around, those of the street, those of the apartments…

Perhaps…?

Does Nikita want to be killed?

"Why do you want to die?" Kostyantyn asks with an adult smile towards a child.

"Because the only thing that matters to me is what I do the worst."

In the end, is Nikita who smiles. Kostyantyn, stunned, sees the longing in his eyes. It’s not the longing to live, not exactly; are the eyes expressing the same as the body, the white flag, the end.

It’s surrender.

Before a surrendered victim, his instinct reminds him, nothing remains to be done but to kill in a slow, slow way, enjoying every drop of blood, a love dance between neck and fangs. Mélovin struggles to take what he has longed to obtain from that angel each night.

Kostya screams a ‘no.’

"What are you saying?" Kostyantyn asks, moved.

 "The truth…"

"But…"

"Do what you want to do, what the light indicates; the one you saw singing Sofia's song has no future. He will not survive."

Nikita releases a laugh that joins to the tears; his mind, beyond good and evil, is too disturbed to continue. Everything that has happened, everything that hasn’t; signs of what he has just comprehended despite brushing the madness with his fingers before a vampire that only looks like a Quixote dressed in black.

He will not survive.

The Nikita who loves to sing, to continue his life like that, to continue without wanting to fight and just as he always has been, so unbearably lonely, trapped in an unwanted loneliness, will die sooner or later.

Because nobody can _understand_ him.

Because nobody will ever do it.

"I'm pissed. If you want it so much, just kill me…" he asks.

Kostyantyn takes three steps backwards.

The same word, the same request, but made thirty-two years later; the same scene, the same surrender, but now he’s a mirror of who he was in the past.

Now, Nikita is him.

Now, he himself is…

He raises a hand when losing control; the lights are gone, all, and Nikita's body is fixed roughly on the column. The moon is the only one to give a clue, to paint a sketch of what happens: Kostyantyn encloses Nikita with his entire body. He holds his jaw in one hand, forces him to look at him as he squeezes it.

He's the most beautiful human being that he has seen, yes. The most beautiful, the most perfect. To believe that he’s a mortal it’s difficult to him, because his beauty almost blinds him. However, there’s no longer life in the features, especially in the eyes.

Not even in the eyes is there anymore.

He passes the right thumb through the lower lip of Nikita's mouth; the cut that he produces with his sharp nail barely makes his victim react, too dedicated to his null destiny to recoil; seduced by the eyes and the death that they propose to perpetuate through their emptiness.

Because of the loneliness that he longs to leave behind.

Seeing a trickle of blood fall down the lip, Kostyantyn revives fantasies with unbearable clarity; surreal images are piling up in his mind, the desire to feel him begging in his ear, to feel how his heart stops against the chest where, at some time, his own heart beat once. The need is more than obscene, more than vehement, more than passionate.

He wants to tear him apart.

Yes, he wants to tear him apart.

Mélovin, that him that he is when he’s clearly the _shadow_ , wants to do what he said in _his_ song.

But Kostya…?

He rubs his half-open mouth against Nikita's lip and feels his whole-body bristle at the mere touch; he stains his lips with a touch, two, three, and from each one savours a tiny drop of blood. Meanwhile, he hurts his hands by squeezing them excessively, by piercing the skin with his own nails.

It’s the sweetest blood that he has ever tasted.

"Nikita…" he whispers without a voice, amazed and disturbed alike for what that angel provokes him.

He tightens his fists on either side of Nikita's face, which is in a shock too deep to think, say, act, feel. The fists tremble when over-tightened.

Mélovin wants to tear apart what Kostya wants to save.

One more touch; one more drop. Kostyantyn perceives with astonishing clarity, in every drop, every feeling of who’s in his arms, who trembles, and trembles, and trembles because of the intolerable coldness of the body that squeezes him against the column, locked in a dark, dense world, and observed by two unequal moons.

There’s so much anguish in that blood, there’s so much fear and pain.

There’s distrust, insecurity.

But why so much, but why with that power…?

From rubbing, a kiss: Kostyantyn kisses Nikita’s lips softly, who doesn’t respond to the action nor moves beyond the tremor. He hasn’t even closed his eyes.

Nothing, but the ocular inequality blinking to the rhythm of the trembling lips that kiss him, he can observe.

Kostyantyn growls at the pain that’s provoked with the nails stuck in his palms along with the sweet, pure, fundamental enjoyment that it means to touch _those_ lips stained by _that_ blood. He raises his fists when he feels the murderous impulse traveling through his veins.

... Humans can’t be lovers of a _shadow_ , because a _shadow_ will always prefer murder over attraction.

Something that he knows well, unfortunately.

But…! That blood, that taste, those feelings encapsulated in every drop! The anguish, the pain, the fear, the impotence.

 _Humans can’t be lovers of a_ shadow, he repeats himself impersonating Mélovin.

 _But humans can be lovers of other humans_ , Kostya concludes when his hands open and cling to Nikita's face, when with a movement he embraces him with supernatural forces, when he turns the innocent touch of the lips into a passionate kiss that deepens each second a little more, that loses him every second a little more, which annihilates him as the most powerful sunlight.

He hugs him, and yes. Embracing this human is like embracing the sun itself.

Nikita feels the passion of the kiss and tries, in a first impulse, to free himself from Kostyantyn by pushing him with his hands. But he doesn’t…! He doesn’t like…! However, the kiss is of such calibre, is such the vehemence that it transmits, that soon achieves the impossible.

Losing him.

In every drop of blood that reaches his tongue when kissing Nikita's lips, Kostyantyn inquires a little more. What’s hidden behind so much anguish? What provokes it? What’s the bandage that blinds him, that doesn’t allow him to abstract from himself, that doesn’t urge him to see how much there’s to express, with the voice, inside his heart?

What is it?!

When Nikita timidly responds to the kiss, first with soft caresses of his mouth and then with his hands as he clasps him by the waist in a gentle, shy touch, Kostyantyn feels him in the beats that, swift as light, hit his chest.

Is it loneliness…?

Is it loneliness the bandage that blinds Nikita?

Is it loneliness, as in Wilde's tale, the girl who rejects the boy's rose overflowed with love?

In Nikita's heart, lost in the kiss and what he feels for its vehemence, the answer is that, exactly that.

It’s loneliness who corrupts him, and Kostyantyn's lips that hug that allows him to silence it for the first time in years.

Undone by the overwhelming feeling of being accompanied, Nikita shrieks in response to the kiss with the same vehemence of Kostyantyn, who squeezes him so hard that, without really wanting it, it makes him gasp in pain.

They stop for that noise, and Kostyantyn sees, in Nikita's heavy breathing, a reflection of himself. Because the _shadows_ don’t need to breathe, but they do it when they want, sometimes to pretend in crowds, sometimes to deceive a chosen victim.

Above all, in the sublime exaltation of supreme pleasure, they do so when their feelings so demand.

Kostyantyn holds each side of Nikita's face with his hands as if he were the fervent lover described by Artem, not the monster that feeds with blood to subsist; he has stained his entire face with blood, something that, from his perspective, is of an inconceivable beauty. He fixes his gaze, sticks pupils on pupils, savouring the perfect blood between his lips that are already reddened by its cause.

"Why do you sing?" he asks.

A flash of life from Nikita's eyes blinded Kostyantyn's ones. It's music, it's beauty, it's truth and feelings.

It’s life, and a mirror, and Nikita's ability to sink, with so little, to the deepest water of his being.

Although dead, _being_.

Although with a dead heart, alive conceptually.

"Because I don’t want to be alone anymore…"

Nikita's response isn’t only the confirmation of what he has clearly felt when kissing him, it’s also like a trigger: the memories pass before Kostyantyn's eyes like an old movie.

 _Kostya_ , he swears to listen from the past, _you will never be alone…_

_You will never be alone again, my love…_

_Because you and I are one forever…_

Nikita slides to the floor when the return of the blinking lights allows him to see the reality. He trembles because of the terror that it manifests in his own eyes, the terror that covers everything, a terror of a colour as red as what, incredulously, he sees.

Kostyantyn touches his cheek, the precise place that Nikita contemplates: he’s crying.

"S-Blood…" Nikita whispers as he covers his head with his arms, as if trying, with the gesture, not to lose it, "you cry blood…! You're a…!"

Kostyantyn looks at the fingers with which he has touched his cheeks.

It's true, he does.

Nikita trembles more and tightens his own head before the repulsive image that confirms the whole, the incredible reality: Kostyantyn isn’t a Quixote dressed in black; he’s a vampire.

Just as Kostyantyn is the last thing that he sees when, as he shouts, the world vanishes in an ephemeral blink.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! Please, if you read this chapter until de end, THANK YOU. This was difficult to translate, very difficult, so…
> 
> Thank you so much for reading. :’)
> 
> I know that I'm giving information slowly, but everything will make sense someday, I swear.
> 
> Who’s Mother? (...) Who are the members of the network? Who turned Kostya into a vampire? Kostya and Mélovin will love each other? Why Niki is soooo soooo soooo insecure? Niki will laugh like in the livestream with Oleg someday? Is Oleg here? Who’s the main villain? I will stop to write kilometric and dumb chapters?
> 
> We will see. XD
> 
> Kostya didn’t explain to Niki why he told him about his vampire nature; that information will appear soon, in the next chapter. Today, was too much. That’s what I felt rereading the chapter before the upload.
> 
> Thank you so much for your support, specially to Pinkphoeniixx and the beautiful comments, Blake and the beautiful tags and Kostya Anon and the beautiful reblogs. THANKS A LOT, I'M HERE FOR YOU!
> 
> See you in next chapter. Maybe the next Monday or Tuesday, because this one it's too long and I don't want to bother you with a lot of updates. :'(
> 
> Thanks for reading my not beautiful mess. ♥


	6. V

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's no turning back: Nikita discovers that there's no way to doubt anymore, that Kostyantyn is telling him the truth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading. Thank you so much. ♥

**V**

 

He walks from one side to another and again and again, from end to end of the room that has been assigned to both since their arrival from Portugal. He brakes when he listens, thanks to his supernatural sense of hearing, how the steps, those, those who he has longed so much in the last minutes, approach.

Kostya enters and Artem doesn’t have time to receive him with the relief that he feels.

"Where you were?!" he exclaims, tense, "Kostya, I thought something had happened to you, it's about to dawn!"

It’s not until he has finished pronouncing his release that he notices the red eyes of his best friend, which shows a fierce cry. Overcome by the love he has for him, Artem reaches him, because Kostya has never moved from the door, and hugs him.

"What happened…?"

Kostya lets go; Artem doesn’t have to think too much, because he knows him like the palm of his hand: this attitude is the one he adopts when he’s sad, so sad that nothing is able to console him. When it happens, Kostya locks himself under seven keys inside himself.

He sees him walking through the room that’s lost in time, of spectacular classical ornamentation, with chandeliers, refined wooden furniture, walls papered in golden tones and coffins worthy of the highest European aristocracy, decorated to the smallest detail by the extravagant and saturated taste of Mother, the oldest _shadow_ of all Europe and founder of the _network_ ; Kostya leans over the table next to the black coffin he uses and, with his back to him, removes his contact lens. He leaves it in its container and scratches his eye for a moment.

When turning towards him, without more inequality in the colours, no Mélovin remains in Kostya.

The look is as blue as it used to be.

"According to Google, it's about three minutes to the dawn," Artem says looking at his cell phone, "if you want, we can talk later."

Kostya smiles, but Artem knows he’s lying. Something has hurt him and very deeply, so much that it doesn’t allow him to hide anything.

Determined, Artem goes to his own coffin, opens it and extends a hand to Kostya.

"Tell me, go," he tells.

As if he were still the boy of the beginning, the one he found in such dire conditions that night in 1986, Kostya, overwhelmed by sadness, agrees and accepts his hand, spilling thin strands of blood through his eyes.

They get into the coffin and Artem closes it, because although there are no windows in the room, it’s _always_ better to close.

Inside the coffin and on the comfortable mattress covered with reddish silk, surrounded by pure darkness, Kostya embraces Artem as if he were only a child. Touched, Artem pats his shoulder being who he is, the older one in vampiric terms.

"You don’t sleep with me since you were born," Artem comments, with the idea of starting the conversation nicely.

Kostyantyn shakes his head from side to side, in denial.

"I did it that time in '91, when we were in Germany. And you cried too!"

"But I hid it! You were a sea of tears, you were happy."

"Imagining the joy of my human parents, yes…"

"And now we are here and you cry with sadness, Kostya. Did something happen with who you _chose_?"

Kostya narrows him further.

"I ruined it."

"How? Or wait, better tell me a little more about that person first. Name?"

"Nikita."

"Is a…?"

"Male."

"Oh, whenever I hear that name I remember that French movie, _Nikita_. In part of the West, women are called 'Nikita' by that film. We already travel so much that….!"

"I'm not in the mood for you to become the know-it-all."

"Then tell me why you ruined it."

Kostya sighs; Artem, when listening to him, doesn’t need to know more. He laughs, and when he feels stiffness in Kostya's body, which means he's on the defensive, Artem speaks without fear.

With the absolute truth in the hands:

"I knew you had fallen in love, I was sure," he says, and he feels how Kostya turns his back on him despite the reduced space.

"I don’t…!"

"This Nikita must be very sweet; you don’t notice anyone."

"Thanks for reminding me that…"

" _He_ also looked sweet, and _he_ was handsome."

"… I know."

"Although _he_ looked (well, _he_ looks, if your theory is right) a little childish in my opinion. Does Nikita have that good boy face too?"

"I don’t know how old he is. He looks like twenty, not much more. He's very… very beautiful."

"I'm not surprised!"

Kostya, slowly, turns towards him and narrows him again. Artem knows that it’s enthusiasm what fills him.

"But his voice, Artem… He has the…!"

"A singer, again?!"

"Yes…"

"Interesting. And why do you say that you ruined it?"

"Because you're right."

"About what?"

"I feel something that I shouldn’t feel."

"You fell in love."

"I…"

"Kostya, humans…"

"But I underestimated Mélovin: he was as determined as I was."

Oh, 'Mélovin'… The same again.

The excuses of the human being in order to justify the _shadow_.

"Mmm…"

"When I understood that I didn’t want to kill him, that I couldn’t even if Mélovin wanted it, resisting was almost impossible. I hurt my hands by pressing too hard, to stop! Mélovin wanted to kill him, but…"

" _You_ are Mélovin, Kostya."

"I know, I just say it like this to explain it to you that…"

"I understand: your killer instinct wanted his blood, but the vestiges of your human emotions prevented it."

"That's right!"

"But both elements make you being you, Kostya. Both are Kostyantyn, after all. You must stop separating so much one element from the other, I've already told you this many times."

"Don’t bother me, not today."

"I'm like your father after all, right? Not the one who created you, but the one who educated you. Sometimes I get into an angry father; someone has to tell you, Kostya: you have to stop splitting your instincts and your emotions in two; one thing has too much to do with the other, it's not that simple."

"That's what I understood today, precisely."

"And that's why you ruined it?"

"Yes."

"Did you kill him?"

"NO!"

"So…?"

"I did something worse. I…"

Kostya hugs him harder, no room for jokes, words or anything else. Artem combs Kostya's hair and joins him with a sigh.

It’s the first time that, in the absolute darkness of the coffin, he feels him like this, the first since his _birth_.

"I know the rules, I'm not stupid. But something in him makes me feel, I don’t know, happy? I wanted to help him, talk to him, support him."

"Of course, yes."

"I mean, I could hear him sing until I turn to ashes, I could look at him until my eyes burn, but I know that…!"

"You can’t do that with a human."

"But I still wanted to get closer to him: somehow, I wanted to be helpful. I know that I can’t relate to him in that way… nor the other, because I doubt that he accepts and I don’t think it's good to offer it just because I want to."

 _The other_? Impressed, Artem tries to think fast: that issue is sensitive for Kostya because of the traumatic nature of his transformation. It's the first time that he mentions it.

That hints at wanting to turn someone into _shadow_.

"The other is complicated, Kostya. You know perfectly well how big the conviction must be."

"Because if there’s no conviction it doesn’t work, right…?"

"True. Also, I think you're rushing. How long have you known him?"

"One month…"

"Shouldn’t you take it more calmly?"

Kostya sobs. Artem wants to scold him for this crush when they are in Ukraine for such an important reason, especially considering his past and that pain that he still carries. But how, if he sobs like this?

How, if he’s sure that he has good intentions for the simple fact of being who he is?

"Don’t tell _mama_ , please."

Artem smiles: how tender is Kostya when he calls her like that.

"Okay, but…"

"Before telling her, I would like to achieve, even though I did what I did to him, that he still wants to see my face again. I wish I could be of help yet!"

"But what did you do to him?!"

"I kissed him…"

Artem covers his face with one hand.

"That's why you hurt your hands?" he whispers in annoyance.

"Yes…"

"And he responded?"

"For a moment, yes… It was when I lost control. Mélovin came out through my pores, I couldn’t reason! I had never been hungrier in all my existence."

An absolute imprudence that, surely, has filled with information inadequate for a human to that Nikita. Artem doesn’t hesitate:

"I explained it countless times because I knew that one day you would fall in love like this, up to this point: _love_ and _sex_ aren’t the kind of concepts that humans and _shadows_ share; are _different_ things for us. We can’t love a human, we can’t want a human in the most physical way, we can’t intimate with a human in any way; we can only feed on their blood. The other instincts will always lose against the pleasure that blood means to us, even when we intimate with another of us. But of course: another _shadow_ can fully enjoy what a human could only suffer."

"I know…"

"This time you restrained yourself, but next time you will not. I don’t care if you kill him or not, I don’t know him, but I worry about what killing him could accidentally cause to you. That's going to hurt you and you've had enough with _him_ and what brought us here. Focus! We are not playing here."

Kostya doesn’t let go, but his hands no longer tighten him.

"Then I'll try to talk to him one last time. It will be the last time I try! And we'll think about _him_ …"

"But why you want to insist, if you say that you ruined it?"

"To not leave him alone…"

How sweet is Kostya. He’s too good and idealistic in comparison to a world that, most of the time, only allows those who are the opposite to survive.

He knows what that phrase means to him; only for that reason he doesn’t oppose.

But he allows himself to give an opinion:

"You are getting involved in matters that don’t concern you: you make decisions for him."

"… I spent too much time away from humans: I forgot that our behaviour and theirs is different, that what’s normal for us isn’t normal for them. But I want to correct it, Artem: I want him to live. He deserves it, and I would like to support him so that he chooses that option and not that of letting himself be defeated."

Kostya laughs over Artem's chest, which is infected by laughter for a single second. He knows that when Kostya laughs like that it’s because he’s determined, infected with the purest conviction.

If the determination that fills him is such, it’s very difficult to contradict him.

"Although I would love it to…! Ah, _mama_ would love him, all those who hear him sing would do it."

“Don’t get such illusions, you silly.”

"I just have to wait, then…"

"For what?"

"An answer. But that will be in a few nights. Now it would be better to sleep, I need to heal my wounds completely. I'll go to my coffin."

"Good."

Kostya opens the lid of Artem's coffin as if it were a feather pillow. Outside the coffin, the only lights that illuminate him from behind are those of the chandeliers chosen by Mother. Artem looks at him for the last time when Kostya smiles at him to say goodbye until the night comes.

Looking into his eyes, he knows that nothing but the illusion fills him.

The same look, but fed by hope and not by disappointment: Kostya is in love and nothing can change his mind, not to Artem, not considering how much he knows him.

When Kostya closes the coffin, Artem closes his eyes.

"Sensitive little boy. You will never change…" he whispers.

Behind Mélovin is always Kostya, for which he will never end up being Mélovin, not for him.

Because he will never end up being Mélovin for anyone.

 

**…**

He wakes up in his bed, he does it in a sudden that refers to those who return to real life after the bloodiest nightmare. Nikita regrets that, on this occasion, the dream has been no more than reality itself.

However, rationality asks for confirmation.

Before the mirror of the bathroom and in the form of a line just above his lower lip and red spots scattered on his cheeks, he confirms it.

He contains a scream as he falls faintly to the floor.

How did he get to his apartment? What happened after seeing tears of blood on Kostyantyn’s face, that Kostyantyn who doesn’t breathe, whose heart doesn’t beat, whose energy is of another nature?

Why Kostyantyn didn’t kill him…?

It's eight in the morning; he throws himself into bed a few more minutes. He must go to work, he must continue with his life as his life is, boring, but normal. However, how difficult it seems after what happened, to discover in the most morbid way the inhumanity of that boy. How to return to the normality of any life after something so extraordinary? He denies to the air by moving his head over and over again, one side and another; he can’t think absolutely nothing.

He’s still in shock.

Overwhelmed, he says to himself that perhaps it was a dream, but the confirmation in the mirror refutes the theory sharply. Then he says that maybe he’s confused, that maybe he hit himself and doesn’t remember anything, but the blood on his face has nothing to do with the wound that he has nor it’s the one that belongs to him. Finally, he accepts that yes, it’s true, period, and the rational explanation of the facts may not be possible at this time. How, if Kostyantyn had cried blood?

How the hell had he crossed a vampire in real life?!

Emotionally exhausted, mentally and physically too, he hugs the pillow and tries to calm down; he trembles just like when he was in Kostyantyn's arms, the precise moment in which he felt irrefutably that no, he would not survive, not the Nikita in love with the music that dreamed of being happy forever thanks to it.

"Why didn’t he kill me…?" he repeats, but this time out loud.

He touches his lip, caresses it wrapped in a transcendental confusion. It had been a kiss, one that death in person had given him on the lips not to express lust or love; the kiss had the shedding of blood as the only reason.

Something, in that idea, destroys him even more.

Moving his head to one side, he sees Carmilla on his night table, a place from which he hasn’t displaced it in days, since obtaining it. Noticing the cover folded awakens the internal alarms and extends the shock to infinity.

He opens the book by taking it from the table: there’s a letter written with a pen on the courtesy pages, four in total.

As seduced as he’s disturbed by the elegant handwriting drawn in black ink, Nikita reads sitting on the edge of the bed, his hands trembling almost exaggeratedly:

 

You fainted at seeing my tears and, when you gave signs of waking up, I slept you with my powers; it was better to let you rest. I understand your reaction; our tears of blood are the most frightening, because they make our already gloomy faces gloomier.

As you will observe, I took the audacity to leave you in your apartment, I’m very sorry. It was the best I could do for you.

Nikita, I'm sorry, I didn’t want that things have been like this. I realized that I didn’t even understand the reasons why I feel this deep and intense need of you. I told you that I _chose_ you without knowing that I had done it in another way.

What I'm trying to tell you is that I didn’t lie to you: I wanted to kill you, that's true, and I know how serious it’s what I say! But above all I still think we could _understand_ each other.

During the talk last night, I couldn’t finish to explain why I threw you _Carmilla_ : was what I felt after hear you sing Sofia’s song: when I was a human, when I was just a young Ukrainian immersed in the Soviet Union who was somewhat shy and quite vulnerable and tried to resist a reality that was adverse for countless reasons, music was my refuge. I felt alone then and I feel alone now, just like you. I know you will not believe me, that you will think I'm lying to you just like Polidori's vampire did, but I'm not like Lord Ruthven, I'm not that psychopath metaphor.

I identify with you, Nikita. I feel, and I didn’t lie in this, that you are like me, that you feel the same way I do, that you suffer the same as me.

That's why I approached you without hesitation to hint at what I’m, because you remind me who I was before I became what I’m. It was like seeing myself in a mirror, seeing myself as a human for the first time in decades! When I saw you so sad on the other side of the window, when I saw you so full of life on that stage in the bar…

What you call empathy; I felt that.

Like when we listen to an artist who reach us, when we read, when we see a drawing or a painting, when a sculpture moves all our senses to tear us inside. As when you notice that you like one thing and not another, and something tells you that it’s not casual. That's what art is about: expressing our emotions and giving them a meaning dictated by what we feel. As you well know, because I know you know, we aren’t compatible with some creations precisely because of that detail: not all of us get the same concept of a certain expression.

To me, your voice moved me like no other before; it reached to the bottom of my heart.

When I listened to you, I felt that your emotions and mine share the same concept. That's why I had the folly to cry in front of you: because you confirmed it to me when talking about your loneliness.

I saw you with so much life that night, I felt you so full, so overwhelmed with feelings! I felt desperate: I wanted to make you understand, or rather the hopeless Nikita I had seen through the window with my _shadow_ eyes, that you didn’t have to give up.

That you had a lot to give yet.

I threw _Carmilla_ to you because I had the crazy idea to tell my own story, yes, that story about a human boy who was alone and couldn’t get ahead, the one who received the _curse_ in the hands of the person who most disappointed him, and who has been decades without leave behind bitter memories of the past, someone who walks looking back.

When you do that, without eyes in the back, it’s obvious that you will crash with something.

I was hoping to tell you about me like Louis to Daniel in _Interview with the Vampire_ , I don’t know…! I used _Carmilla_ to start giving you an idea and that the theme was already installed in your mind when I told you. I wanted to tell you _everything_ about myself, to give you my feelings as a kind of offering to give you ideas with my experience, to cooperate in the well-being that you deserve to give yourself, because that’s what it’s all about.

I wanted to talk to you about how I always find my consolation in music, even now even though I keep walking on my back.

I wanted, I don’t know, help?

I wanted to try to be helpful, yes. I wanted you to find the key that I found through the years in what respect to music, that different way of feeling it that allow you to find the key that you have lost, loss for which you are like this, like turning in circles…

I could say much more, but I prefer to leave it for a moment where you let me tell you what I feel.

If you want, of course.

I will respect if you don’t want to see me again. I will not stay long in Kiev anyway, because once I resolve my problem, that which makes me walk looking back, I long to go to Odessa, my home, and stay there all I can, until I get tired of eternity.

Forgive me for this childish persecution; to be what I’m is to have impulses like this, hunter impulses; inhuman attitudes that don’t match with a humanity as high as yours. I had never heard, seen or felt a human being more resplendent than you.

I'll go to see you on Friday, at nine thirty at night, so as not to interrupt you during your work. If I don’t find you there, I promise don’t bother you again.

I'll be there,

Kostyantyn. B.

 

Nikita drops the book to the floor. He looks at it, blurred, between his feet, while the tears slide down to his neck. He holds his hair with his hands, laughs, and no.

He can’t believe it.

This is real? Is this happening? Did those lips kiss him for that reason and not for another? And why did he squeeze his hands? And why sometimes did he seem as cold as his touches were…?

How to believe that this is real, if it seems a plot invented by himself, at his convenience and whim?

He looks the hour: it's 9 o'clock, He should be opening. Dizzy and without time to shower, he changes clothes from the previous night for new clothes, he washes his face, puts a band on his lip and runs to take the taxi with _Carmilla_ in one hand and his cell phone in the other. Opens the bookstore at 9:48.

He sits on his chair, opens _Carmilla_ , goes to the last page of the letter:

"Kostyantyn B…" he reads in a whisper.

He needs an external proof, the definitive proof.

Using incognito navigation mode in Google Chrome, as if doing so could protect him from something or from someone, he writes 'disappearances' and it stops. Reads the letter one more time, unable to think of anything than the vampire.

"He lived in the Soviet Union…"

Undoubtedly, he had been human at some point in the twentieth century. But in what decade?

Without answers, keeps writing in the Google search engine:

'Disappearance Kostyantyn B Soviet Union.'

Outmoded photos of men, children, elderly, but none look like him; he goes down the screen, and nothing. Without his full name, he understands, this search doesn’t make sense.

What if…?

Too intrigued and guided by a mere premonition without rational sustenance, he changes the word 'disappearance' to 'murder'.

Goes down, goes down, goes down, and a blurry photo of Kostyantyn emerges in the sea of faces that Nikita glimpses. Stunned, squeezes the photo and enters the page from which it comes. Just at the half of the page, among other fifty photos included with the title _Forgotten Crimes_ , he finds him.

"Kostyantyn Bocharov?"

The page is one of the police types with old style, surely of the first years of Internet by its design, and it includes crimes occurred in Eastern Europe in Russian language. In the photo that presents the article, Kostyantyn has brown hair and two blue eyes. His skin, although pale, doesn’t look inhuman, and in his eyes lies another kind of grace.

It’s as pure as that of their first encounter.

He’s in the street, alone next to a tree, forcing a smile so charming as all those that, when visiting him in the bookstore, he has given him.

"Born on April 11, 1965 in his native Odessa, then part of the Soviet Union, Kostyantyn was a music and theatre student recognized in small circles for his talent as a pianist, who had learned to play in his own way during his childhood. Described by his family as lonely and charming, he’s said to be a regular boy, with no frights, no greys, no relationship with anyone, no close friends, no evidence of harmful ties or enemies of any kind. Nothing in his biography sounded suspicious.

At some point on the night of his 21st birthday, on April 11, 1986, he’s presumed to have been brutally murdered.

Police found a scene of the crime as explicit as incomplete: in his room, on his sheets, a bloodstain. With the blood, nothing. The blood, corresponding to his DNA as revealed by later studies, wasn’t evidence of certain death, but the disappearance of his body remains a mystery.

For lack of evidence, the crime lies unfinished. At the media, because of the Chernobyl nuclear accident that occurred two weeks later, the case lost its validity and was quickly forgotten.

No more data available."

Nikita releases the cell phone on the table and walks around the premises, tense. If he had any doubt, no, he can’t now: the one in the photo is the Kostyantyn he knows, different, human, but the same.

With the same purity in the eyes. With the same perfect smile.

Takes the cell phone again to search for him by his full name in a thousand and one ways, but only returns to the same old-fashioned design page written in Russian.

How he died? Who killed him?

He hugs himself looking from the shop window at _Carmilla_ settle on the table next to his cell phone. He goes to the book, opens it and rereads the letter one time, and other, and again. He attends clients, abandons it and takes it back, but spends the whole day returning to it as if it were nothing more than an addictive song playing in a loop.

Just at night, while closing, he notices something.

"The dream…" he whispers as he runs to his apartment stalked not by vertigo, but by loneliness.

The night before he met him, he dreamed he was drowned by a rain of blood from a moon. A voice, while, sang to him that please look at him, that he did it, because otherwise he would die.

What kind of premonition had that been?

It means that…?

Sad, he brakes in a corner three blocks from his apartment; he’s overloaded by the most unequal emotions. Looks for the moon in the sky as if all the answers lie in it, but only glimpses bulky grey clouds.

"The moon was an eye and cried blood…" he whispers.

He’s not going crazy; everything is real.

He runs to his apartment without suspecting that, at the top of the building on the opposite corner, someone observes him stealthily, determined not to give himself away, now or ever if Nikita so decides. Seeing him leave, Kostyantyn closes his eyes and squeezes his face.

He did everything wrong.

The insecure and fearful Kostya had ruined everything before the incisive coldness of Mélovin; Mélovin's cruelty had done no good in comparison to Kostya's empathy. By thinking like that, on one side and the other and not together as Artem always points out, Nikita may never want to see his face again.

For having thought so badly and for having felt so disorderly, it wasn’t until he tasted his blood that he understood everything.

Remembers, sitting on the edge of the terrace of the building on which he is, one of ancient construction of no more than five floors, how he embraced him when he fainted, how he ran and jumped through roofs and walls with him in his arms until his department, how he entered it when opening and closing doors with his telekinesis, feeling the worst in the world. He didn’t want to enter his apartment for the first time like this, carrying him unconscious after having kissed his lips more out of hunger than out of love.

Because of the hunger that, suddenly and because of the anguish, could no longer regain control of his being.

If he had thought things through! If he had been less impulsive, if he had worried more about him…!

If he had not been like Carmilla, if he had not sickened Nikita with horror because of his childish impulsiveness…

Upon entering, he laid Nikita on the bed and, not without some embarrassment, he took off his shoes and opened his bed to cover him. He did, covered him to the neck of the cold of the night, and sitting next to him he remained, watching him, studying him, marvelling at a dizzying pace with each damn detail of each faction. He was real? He was human and didn’t have an imperfection, and his physical beauty had the audacity to not to be his most commendable characteristic, not if one considered the incandescent brightness of his voice.

He wanted him.

He didn’t want him to be his, because a _shadow_ can’t believe in possession and a human shouldn’t either. He didn’t want to force him to anything, but he wanted him, after all; he wanted Nikita with him, next to him, singing his anguish or listening to his; he wanted to share everything with him, to bless his five senses with him, with the beauty of his voice and his face and his scent and the delight that a simple touch between their skins could generate.

He wanted his blood, yes, but he wanted his voice more. Being able to listen to the voice every night, being able to express his own voice in unison with his.

Being for Nikita what Kostya, the most emotional part of his own being, had never been able to find in anyone, not completely. Because neither Artem nor Mother had been able to mean something similar to him, not at that level.

Being that special presence, that equal before the inequality, that partner with whom share it all, the feeling, the art, the passion, the delirium.

He wanted to share his existence with him and be, in his life, all that Kostya had so longed for not only the last thirty-two years, but also in the twenty-one as a human.

Been his complement.

Being the audience that could love up to the most intimate and sincere the true emotion of his voice.

Be that, yes.

To be the one who completes the work of an artist: the one who, on the other side, feels the work and sees his world transformed by its mere existence.

And he was rushing too much, it was true.

As he put his face close to his, craving to kiss him, he realized that he was breathing with evident agitation. He laughed without brushing his lips for the human reflexes that he caused him. Because a _shadow_ doesn’t need to breathe to live, because it doesn’t live. But a _shadow_ needs to breathe when it feels.

How not to agitate before the multisensory beauty of Nikita? How not to hit his mouth with his breath? If he was a celestial creature.

An angel.

 _The_ Angel.

He opened his mouth, unable to contain himself: he needed to kiss him, to barely brush his lips, to feel them against him.

He stopped himself by hurting more his hands, and with a smile promised in a seductive murmur:

"Only if you want, only when you want."

He wasn’t going to make the same mistake. He wasn’t going to decide for him anymore.

Restless, he stood up and walked through the apartment anxious to organize his ideas from that last thought. He saw vinyl’s and CDs stacked against a stereo settle on a corner, saw the full discography of Red Hot Chili Peppers in both formats, also albums of Muse, Queen, Radiohead, Pink Floyd, Michael Jackson, Madonna, The Black Eyed Peas? He laughed a moment; the next, he observed him.

"Soulmate!" he said almost as if he were, still, a too human teenager.

He had an incredible collection of CDs and vinyl, and although The Black Eyed Peas didn’t like him at all, no more than other contemporary artists, oh, how could he not love that he still listened to music in those formats so displaced by the damn streaming, YouTube and the MP3? He liked analog, what he had grown up with in the eighties.

Enough reason to wanted him even more.

He returned to the bed; as he did so, he noticed _Carmilla_ on the night table. He took it in his hands, walked through the room, and when he found a pen between books in the vast library, he used the courtesy pages to do what he needed.

Express what he so faithfully felt. That he wanted his voice, that he didn’t want his blood.

Now, on the building and with no more trace of Nikita, who left a few minutes ago, Kostyantyn is more convinced than ever.

He wants Nikita.

He wants him by his side forever.

... But _forever_ isn’t an option. He can’t convert him, he can’t risk doing it. He needs to consult Mother first, he should also ask to Artem to explain how, since he has been refusing to take that delicate lesson for thirty-two years.

Don’t even say to remember in detail when it happened to him.

Mainly, should be Nikita who wants it.

Because everything, from today and between them, even when it hurts and provokes a pain as eternal as his existence can be, will be decided by Nikita.

All.

Even if they are only friends if he accepts to see him again despite how Mélovin has sucked his blood.

If he does, Kostyantyn will not do anything to make more that friendship, make it everything, too much.

So that it’s what he really wants.

Love.

Because, after all, Artem is always right.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading!
> 
> Quick comments:
> 
> The name "Nikita", yes, is partly because of that movie, but also because of a song by Elton John. I didn’t want to mention it because it was a detail too absurd to give it depth (?).
> 
> About Kostya entering Nikita's apartment without invitation, in many vampire stories this is not possible, a vampire can’t enter a house without an invitation, but if I’m honest it’s a detail that I have never seen interesting, that's why I discarded it.
> 
> About Mélovin vs. Kostya: Only someone who has used a pseudonym for a long time can understand to what extent it can be turned against. I would like to talk about the theme, the image we give, the one that people absorb and the one that they hide, using Mél as a character that allows me to explore the element. I want it to be a permanent element in the story, so I hope it's not too bad.
> 
> About Mother, I think I already gave enough clues (?).
> 
> When is Nikita going to stop being emo? XD This is part of my malicious plan, I want to show how these emotions that he has now evolve, involute and evolve again in different points of what is coming. Excuse me, it's that I'm enthusiastic about those things. With Mél the same: I want to feel them as much as possible.
> 
> And the same goes for the third protagonist, who will appear soon.
> 
> (Soon in a Mél mode XD)
> 
> Thanks foreva to Di, Blake, Jadoremelekseev, Cuddlyein and Kostya Anon for being with me! IT MEANS A LOT FOR ME, THANK YOU!
> 
> See you. :')


	7. VI

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He knows that he loses nothing by staying, but in Nikita there's also another need to do so.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, thank you forever. ♥

**VI**

 

Learning to kill humans was hard for him. Him, the one whom when he was still alive was a boy who had everything to be happy, the one whom only when he received the _curse_ did realized how much he had lost. The smile of his human parents, the warmth of a beloved body, the brightness of the sun that knows how to beautify everything with its light. Killing, it was supposed, had to fill him as nothing in his new conceptual life, but having been stripped of his humanity there was no way of wanting something that wasn’t all that, out of mere ignorance, he hadn’t come to enjoy.

However, thanks to the _network_ , criminals became his favourites. Among them, the rapists were his greatest predilection.

Killing them, literally, made him happy.

It’s that, as he thinks, rapists are despicable, the most despicable humans that can exist, so much so that they don’t deserve to enter in the human category, because to compare a wretch of that calibre with someone like Nikita is a calamity, an injustice. And how pathetic they look pretending to be shadows, wandering among the humans and soulless inside the eyes, looking for the right victim to do that something that’s worse than killing.

Because death in life, that which isn’t chosen, is the worst way to die. It wasn’t what had happened to him, not technically, luckily, but somehow, as conceptual as the life he has now and the heart that allows him to feel, the situation is the same.

 _He_ , by not giving him the option to choose whether he wanted to become a _shadow_ or not, had, conceptually, done the same to him.

Killing him in life.

Because of his predilection, Mother asked specially for him when wake up today:

"You go, I want it to be you. We have to eliminate him urgently; the police can’t catch him and he has already attacked at least seven women in recent weeks. You know what that means, sweetie…" she told him in her perfect American English learned at the time she lived in New York.

"Yes, _mama_ ," Kostyantyn replied as he kissed her cold but perfect hand with his always messy but elegant English, because of the marked Ukrainian accent that he never manages to get out while speaking another of the fifteen languages he dominates.

And there it is the wretch for whom the Ukrainian justice has demanded an urgent death, looking with dissimulation at the girl he has chosen, a young girl of about twenty-eight years with beautiful golden curls on her head, short and husky, beautiful inside her fleshy tanned skin, walking down a dark street without suspecting what someone plans to do; that, if the wretch doesn’t die, she will die in life tonight.

When walking along the wall of a building in the direction of the wretch, a man of about thirty-five, tall, with black hair, in good shape but with a face perhaps too exotic, Kostyantyn wonders, from one second to another, the same thing that he always asks himself before killing.

Is he like them?

He hears Mother's voice whispering to him what she whispered when gave him his first victim after Kostyantyn refused to hunt with Artem, who had assumed the role of educator in the absence of _him_ , who had ruined everything in his life by lying to him as _he_ had done it.

"Sweetie, I know that you feel like a monster. It could be said that we are, that we are monsters, but who’s so clean, either in life or death, to be considered the opposite? We all make mistakes, we hurt, we reject, we lie. Every wound that we have left on someone one day will burn us, because the energy that moves us through existence comes and goes, abandons us and returns. But you know what? If we have this supernatural gift to kill, if we can move through darkness as electricity moves through a cable, at a supernatural speed, what's wrong with helping a little the world? Because there’s a difference between those who make mistakes and those who commit crimes: both hurt, harm, kill, destroy, but only criminals _enjoy_ doing it. Therefore, you shouldn’t doubt.

Kostyantyn, son: you are not like them. You are a _shadow_ , a monster, a murderer, but inside you, for what you were when you were still alive, you will be always a human, not a criminal. You know why?"

"Why?" he asked in the past and repeats in the present.

Mother's voice is heard so clearly that it's as if she were next to him right now:

"Because you feel" she replied in her perfect Ukrainian; "because, although your heart no longer beats like a human's, it still exists conceptually inside of you. The rest is about feeding on those who enjoy evil, to stay eternal to continue eliminating the real monsters of the world, those that exist because of the world itself: those who _enjoy_ doing evil."

He has spent too many years wondering if that was true. Thanks to Nikita, he remembers when sees the rapist passing under him, who’s waiting for him standing in the shadows of the wall, knows that yes, Mother didn’t lie, that everything is true.

He’s not like them and never will be. Not even though he enjoys it.

Because what makes him happy of killing them is, as he will with that girl, help.

The following happens as fast as ever, because the _network_ is strict with its recommendations: the lights of the lonely street gone, the girl with golden curls follows her path without noticing it and the rapist rises through the shadows until he hits the roof of an old building with Kostyantyn hanging from his neck thanks to his sharp fangs.

"No!" the man sobs as Kostyantyn sucks.

"Yes…!" moans Kostyantyn without letting go of his neck.

When he finishes, he throws himself into the void with the corpse in his arms: Artem waits for him in the black Volkswagen Golf that Mother has given them when they arrive to Ukraine. Kostyantyn throws the corpse in the back seat, climbs on the passenger side and feels how Artem drives at full speed.

Only when they turn away the lights in the round return to normality.

Kostyantyn holds a hand to his chest and, for pleasure, breathes as deep as he can. His heart beats strongly for all the blood ingested.

He licks himself looking in the rear-view mirror; Artem brakes at a traffic light.

"Are you going to see him today?" he asks.

"I don’t know," Kostyantyn answers, and it's true, because he doesn’t know.

It's Friday, at last: today he'll know if Nikita wants him out of his life or not.

Looks at the clock on the car's dashboard: exactly fifteen minutes are missing and they are not far from the bookstore.

"If that Nikita agrees to see you, then remember to be prudent, especially with our secrets."

"Ok."

"You always say 'ok', 'yes', 'of course' but in the end you end up forgetting it all. Please, don’t reveal things about the _network_."

Somewhat annoyed by Artem's wrathful father's side, Kostyantyn nods more emphatically.

"I can hurt myself for clumsiness, but I would never let anything happen to _mama_ and you."

Artem laughs. Does he believe him or not?

"All right, I'll trust you just because you named Mother."

Kostyantyn laughs too.

When Artem is about to turn in the last corner, around the one of the bookstore, Kostyantyn examines himself in the mirror for the last time: something doesn’t please him. When he discovers what, he takes something out of his pocket and smiles to himself.

Or, rather, he smiles to Mélovin.

Looks, on his left hand, the container of his white contact lens, he looks at it as if it were the container of much more. Of truth, of joy, of the exact meaning of everything that he feels.

And no; it’s outside, in that human eyes, where it is.

Removes the lens, puts it in place, closes the container, scratches his eyelid. Artem watches him for one second.

"You look good like that," he says as he turns the corner.

Kostyantyn looks himself for the last time before getting out of the car, which Artem has parked in front of the bookstore, on the opposite sidewalk.

Being fed, Mélovin shouldn’t go back today.

With his vampiric side being so satisfied, it only remains to let Kostya take care of the rest.

 

**…**

 

The week passes in slow motion. In the middle, all kinds of challenges are presented to him; disguise that nothing extraordinary has happened in his ordinary life becomes a difficult challenge to overcome.

"Are you eating well?" a client asks on Wednesday, that one of the essays. "You look stressed."

Or the boss's call on Thursday:

"Nikita, is something wrong?"

"No, Mr. Oleg. I'm fine…"

"Sure?" A laugh is heard on the other side of the call. "Nikita, Nikita… You're not very good at dissimulating, you know? When you are worried you are noticed from Belarus!"

He laughs when listening to him. What a strange ability has his boss to make him laugh even when nothing around him seems coherent, when everything is synonymous of pain and anguish.

"I'm fine, really. Thanks for…"

"If you don’t take the vacations that you didn’t take in two years, I'll force you to do it. You make me feel an exploiter!”

"No, sir. Don’t…"

"Nikita Alekseev, I'll come see you tomorrow and we'll talk, okay?"

And that does on Friday at noon, appear before him after two other customers asked, as well as the client on Wednesday and many others, if he was sick or something, because he looked strange, tired, gone.

"Look at those dark eyes bags!" Mr. Oleg shouts when entering the bookstore in which Nikita, without knowing what else to read, re-reads _Carmilla_ for the fourth or fifth time.

"Mr…"

He approaches him, leans his elbows on the table and leans towards Nikita between mockery and genuine concern.

"Do you have a health problem?"

"No."

Can the presence of a vampire in his life be considered as such?

"Are you eating well?"

"Yes…"

Not really. How to eat, if a vampire…?

"Did you break up with a girlfriend?"

He blushes. The inquisitive look of Mr. Oleg causes a nervous laugh in him. He contains it when covering his face.

How to think about having girlfriends, if Kostyantyn…? If that kiss and that gaze and that letter and and that voice…

He beats his chest to ward off such inappropriate thoughts from there and from all of himself, from the complete reality in which he finds himself still circling.

"Love issues, I see…" Mr. Oleg supposes for his lack of answer.

"No sir! I…"

"Or is it about a man?"

"What?! No! No way!"

Crushed by shame, confusion and modesty, Nikita laughs so much nervous that he hides from Mr. Oleg by standing up and turning his back on him. He appears at his side, on the other side of the table, and touching his shoulder catches his attention.

"How old are you?"

"Twenty-five, sir…"

"And are you shocked like that by the idea of being with another man? Come on, Nikita! Your generation has to crush the conservative thinking of the elderly, it has to establish another kind of thinking, a healthier one for the whole population. Don’t scandalize yourself like that, it's fine! If it happens it's fine, if it doesn’t happen it's fine too, but don’t shut yourself up in such antiquated thoughts, please! Leave that to the old ones."

Mr, Oleg is a very prestigious man to whom life has taken to various corners of the world, but he’s also mad; in his madness, many things sound saner than those dictated by reality. Nikita knows it, that's why he just agrees when nods.

He knows that he’s right, what he says is not far from what he himself thinks despite the prejudice of so many people, but he cannot think properly about it, he doesn’t want to, he has no way.

Not with respect to that, to the _shadow_ , to the vampire.

"Nikita, I don’t know what's happening to you and I will not force you to tell me, but I'll force you to take a few days out of work." Oleg shakes him by the shoulders, as if he wants to emphasize his words, or at least he feels that. "Go home, put Kiedis at full volume, sing as much as you can, relax and I will see you the second week of December. I will attend the bookstore meanwhile, it’s time to stay more often here and fight with the distributors face to face."

"No, it isn’t necessary!"

"It is, and I don’t accept your refusal. Today we will do the accounts for Saturdays and tomorrow your holidays will begin. You're exhausted, it's time for you to rest."

"But…!"

"I don’t listen to you, I don’t hear anything! Come on, let's take stock of the week."

They do it, and then they accommodate, and then they make orders, and then they leave everything ready for Nikita to take his free days. At eight, Mr. Oleg is ready to leave. He gives some last indications before doing so, and it’s not until he prepares to say goodbye, one on each side of the table, that he insists:

"Hey, Nikita. One last thing."

"Tell me, sir."

"I don’t want to invade you, but I know perfectly well that you don’t have anyone. If you need advice or something, I know that I’m your boss and that you respect what that means, but I can listen to you, it’s not a problem. Really."

Nikita smiles feeling a deep uneasiness inside his chest. Mr. Oleg has always been kind to him, a good boss, a person who has never treated him as if he were less, but as a co-worker, with no hierarchy that could elevate him before anyone. He’s touched by the offer, he does it in a blunt way, because except Kostyantyn, he has not heard anything like that for years.

When he feels tears in his eyes and a sad smile escapes from him, Mr. Oleg puts aside his characteristic humour and squeezes his shoulder with one hand.

"Don’t be sorry, tell me," he insists.

Nikita, covering his mouth for a moment, takes a breath and says it without knowing, until doing so, how much he has longed to speak with someone about the subject, with an unprecedented desperation:

"I met someone."

"Aha."

"And kissed me."

"Aha…"

"Is a pianist, and also sings. Is… I never had anything with someone like that."

"Like what?"

He cannot tell him that he’s a vampire without being taken as an insane; on the other hand, Nikita can say something else:

"Is a man…"

Oleg smiles.

"Wow! I said it jokingly and it turned out to be true." Nikita holds a shout when listening.

How difficult to say, how complicated to accept it!

"He told me to see us tonight, he wants to talk to me about some things, but I don’t know, sir… I…" Nikita restrains by the modesty he feels.

Mr. Oleg smiles and nothing else.

"Did you answer the kiss?"

"Well…"

"Don’t feel ashamed, Nikita. Just say it and we'll see what I can tell you to help."

Nikita clears his throat. Squeezes the lips, tense, and frowns.

"For a second, huh, yes…"

"And you liked it?"

"I don’t know…"

"How you don’t know?"

"I was in shock and…"

"And him?"

"He what?"

"Do you think he’s handsome or something? Do you like something about him?"

"What…?"

Overwhelmed, Nikita looks at the floor. He hasn’t thought about that, he hasn’t done it once. Well, he believes him handsome as anyone can believe it, but he hasn’t thought about himself…, if he…

"I haven’ looked at him in that way," he responds at last. "Honestly, no, I haven’t looked at him in that way."

Taking out the smile, first, and above all the voice.

"Mmm…" Mr. Oleg looks at the walls, the ceiling, the door, the floor, and there are only questions on his face. Soon, it's as if something came to his mind.

"I think you should see him today."

"Mr…?"

"Yes! I mean, how long have you been without relating to a girl in that way?"

Sad, Nikita thinks about her and wishes her the best as every time that, enraptured by the memory, he draws in his mind her perfect frown in front of the emotion that caused her to hear opera with him.

"Two years…"

"The lyrical singer you used to date when I hired you?"

"Yes. She lives in Estonia now, she's doing very well…"

"All right! In that case, I think you should try. It has been a long time since the last time and maybe this experience, grow or not, can be enriching for you. What do you think? You don’t lose anything, Nikita. Life is very short, enjoy more and think less! You are too young to be so alone."

In fact, no, he loses absolutely nothing. Only life if Kostyantyn has lied and in an hour and a little he plans to kill him right there, in the bookstore.

As in the dream, he on a bed of books watching a moon crying.

"But…"

"Nothing!" Mr. Oleg turns to the door and walks there quickly. Flips before opening it. "Try to look at him in another way, outside and inside, of course, and then you'll see what to do, I'm sure." He greets him with a hand and a smile. "Happy holidays, Nikita!"

Without further ado, he leaves, and Nikita is left alone with the books, yes, and also with the clock on the wall, which impatiently tells him that it’s eight thirty, that it’s only an hour before Kostyantyn arrives.

One hour, then, to decide what to do.

Rereads the letter timidly, sitting in his usual chair; thinks about what Kostyantyn has told him, that he will go at nine thirty, that he prefers to tell him more as soon as they see him, that if he doesn’t stay after working hours to wait for him, he will never look for him again.

Thinks about the dream, about the moon crying blood, about the voice asking him not to die.

"He’s going to kill me…"

The question is, does he mind?

Or does he care more about that thought that has been in the background all along, the idea of allowing himself to look at him as Mr. Oleg has advised, with different eyes, with the same eyes with those which he uses to look at a woman?

Because, unlike what his boss has advised, Nikita knows that he has already seen the inner beauty of Kostyantyn.

In the insane intensity of the kiss, but especially in the indisputable beauty of his voice.

The red colours he had seen surrounding him, the extreme emotion that had infected him despite the warning of the lyrics.

He already knew that: on the inside, Kostyantyn is beautiful, and his inner beauty likes him. And it doesn’t matter if he kills him or not, or if he's a vampire or a human, or whatever, because his dreams are still broken and nothing can fix them.

He’s between life and death whether or not he stays.

He loses nothing; that’s why, he decides, he will stay.

Sighs deeply.

Yes, he will stay.

It's nine o'clock; he turns the door sign and turns off each light of the bookstore, all but one, the hidden lamp between two libraries, where more than once, on particularly lonely nights, he has stayed to read after working. There he sits, in the wooden chair next to the lamp, and with _Carmilla_ in one hand he waits without waiting.

Silently, not knowing how fast the clock is moving, whether it's going in slow motion like during the whole week or at full speed because of the anxiety caused by the uncertainty, he thinks about the bed with the blood stain, the unsolved mystery, the boy who had never returned, the vampire that Kostyantyn has been for thirty-two years. Had they transformed him against his will? Had they left him dead in life because of a promise never fulfilled?

Had he suffered….?

The summary of the crime page said the same as the letter: Kostyantyn was lonely.

And someone who disappointed him had transformed him.

And he was a pianist, and he loved music, and his voice was as perfect as his smile.

As perfect as the kiss that…

"N-Nikita…" he hears, and the voice is as sweet as the dream, like that of the song-warning too.

Like the smile with sharp teeth, perfect.

He looks at him feeling a chill go up his back: Kostyantyn is standing before him, happy, excited, with a look between moved and flirtatious. Nikita notices that his eyes are those of the photo on the old-fashioned website: blue, both. When he looks into his eyes, the fear mixes with the disgust, with the pleasant, with a longing without name or form, lacking of a concrete, but powerful despite that, meaning.

"Nikita, I would like to…"

"Why did you bring your eyes like this?" Nikita asks, interrupting him, determined to investigate the change before talking about anything else.

Kostyantyn gets even more excited: he has noticed the detail.

Has he also noticed that the light didn’t blink?

"It seemed like a nice idea," he replies. He’s so happy that he feels his voice trembling with every word, and how a laugh is about to escape from him. He was sure he wouldn’t find him there; to be able to see him once again, to notice every detail of his eyes, his face, his body; have the honour of being able to listen to his sweet voice once more… " Do you like it?"

He likes it? Nikita asks himself, but he cannot answer even in the privacy of his own mind, much less in the bundle of tension that constitutes, now, his heart.

He sighs, and frowning at feeling somehow softened by the sweet look of the boy in front of him, the one who reminds him so much to the Internet page, he says to himself that, in order to achieve sincerity, now he must be the only thing who knows how to be.

Him:

"Isn’t easy. This… This isn’t easy."

Kostyantyn tries to resist: he’s saddened for not receiving an answer, but he understands why Nikita has said those words. Of course, it’s not easy, there’s no way that it is to meet a _shadow_ as vampiric as the books.

"I know what you feel. I feel very sorry for..." Kostyantyn keeps quiet as he looks in more detail at Nikita's face, who’s watching him seriously from below, sitting before him in that wooden chair.

Is he a little thinner? And the dark eye bags under his eyes, and the explicit weariness of his eyes, and the sudden pallor of his skin, and the barely noticeable scar on his lip. All of him looks off, just like an adult _shadow_ when he doesn’t suck blood for more than a month.

Did he hurt him so much?

"You have not been eating well, right?"

Nikita smiles at him; when he does so, Kostyantyn notices the level of exhaustion.

"It has been difficult after the last time. Not every day you cross a vampire and he corners you against a wall to take your blood…"

"But you believe me, don’t you?"

Nikita smiles faintly with his eyes fixed on the ground; Kostyantyn feels that he begins to recognize some typical gestures about him.

Recognizing them begins, slowly, to amaze him.

"I'm so sorry, I lost control," Kostyantyn whispers in pursuit of earning what's going on, deserving it enough.

To have Nikita in front without hatred in the eyes.

Nikita doesn’t answer, although he doesn’t look irritated like in the bar or in shock like on the terrace; rather, he looks thoughtful, with expectations. Kostyantyn sees how he removes the cell phone from his pocket, how he looks for something in the photo gallery, how he extends the phone to him.

"I believe you, yes," he says, and Kostyantyn needs to inhale and exhale to release the bundle of emotions that overload him on the inside, "even though it's hard for me to understand, even though I feel that I lose contact with reality and that I’m terrified of being invented all in my head, I believe you…"

Kostyantyn looks at the screen; he feels how the threads of blood are trying to get out of his tear ducts.

It's Kostya.

He’s the one who was Kostya when he was still human.

Is him.

He takes Nikita's cell phone and looks at himself in the photograph, absorbed for the image of himself that he already thought was forgotten in his memory.

"Where did you get this from?"

Nikita responds with an admirable calm given the confused circumstances:

"A website about murders. Some things that you told me coincide with what that web says. I mean: I could get paranoid, but this only confirms everything you said in the letter. You… you were a pianist in the eighties, and you studied acting and music, and you were lonely, and they never found your body…"

Kostyantyn, like a knight before the king, kneels in front of Nikita with his eyes always fixed on the photo of himself that shines on the cell phone screen. His hair! The clothes so typical of the eighties, the tree that was in the corner of his house, in his beloved Odessa…

"Why did you feel lonely?" Nikita asks suddenly.

Kostyantyn looks up at him: Nikita looks at him with genuine interest. He’s shy, silent and somewhat tense, but interest is what he reveals in his eyes.

Does he want…?

He has stayed to talk about…?

"When children make fun of you all day, when they say that you look like this, that you look like that, that you are not worthy to be their friend, that you are less; when they torment you just for being different from them…"

"Bullying?"

Kostyantyn laughs charmingly.

"That's how you call that now." He sighs deeply as he finds open the door of his own conceptual heart, ready to release old and sad memories. Urged by Nikita's eyes to it, Kostyantyn continues: "These things always affect children; people tend to underestimate how much damage they can do. The scars remain, you know? They remain; they never leave. You become… insecure forever, because there’s a point where it doesn’t matter what you do or what you know about yourself: they tell you so many times that you're worth nothing that you end up believing it."

Nikita's brow furrows with such charm that Kostyantyn has no doubt: he’s moved. What he’s saying moves him.

Moved by it too, Kostyantyn doesn’t stop:

"It has always been difficult for me to feel confident, it’s very difficult for me to interact with people, they generate me a lot of discomfort."

"But when you sing, you're not like that."

Kostyantyn smiles so much that he feels that his mouth, soon, hurts. How he can say something so beautiful? He feels Mélovin so sleepy, he feels so awakened that Kostya from the photograph, that he discovers him in a situation and a feeling that he thought were forgotten.

Being Kostya is not that bad, maybe.

Without realizing it, he diverts the subject:

"When I lived, to give me confidence when singing and playing, I invented an stage name."

"Which one?"

"Mélovin."

Nikita laughs.

"What? Melówin?"

"Why does everyone always pronounce it wrong?!"

"It sounds strange, something like _Halloween_."

"Exactly! Quite daring considering that time, but… Oh, no regrets!"

Looking at each other, they laugh at the same time. They lower their eyes, raise it, and when they meet again they are smiling in the same way, like a mirror reflecting the exact image in the other. Kostyantyn feels magic in the look that, for a perfect moment, they share.

Nikita, on the other hand, isn’t capable of reasoning how magical it’s also for him, not yet.

"It was like playing a character, that gave me a lot of confidence, it helped me. It was like leaving behind the Kostya who was mocked by the other kids, like adopting another identity in order to _stop_ being that child, to take out from that child everything that still had hope of surviving."

"I understand that. I used to use my last name."

Kostyantyn shows his teeth, radiant.

"Really? What's your last name?"

"Mmm… Alekseev."

Nikita Alekseev, then.

Beautiful.

"Oh… It sounds good for stage name! Although I find it hard to believe that you need something like that."

Nikita laughs and does it with enthusiasm. How can Kostyantyn say something so beautiful?

How, being so talented, can he see something nice to him?

"I get very nervous when I sing," Nikita replies, shy, modest, "I tremble and tend to being out of tune, because I’m distracted by tension and…"

"What?! Is that a joke?!" Kostyantyn feels so outraged that he leaves his mouth wide open for an entire funny moment. "I noticed you tremble, but I think it adds a lot to your interpretation! It makes it very emotional. When I saw you singing Sofia's song, you transmitted to me a huge emotion, it came to me! I liked absolutely everything, even what you might consider an untidiness."

Nikita feels his cheeks burn: yes, he’s blushing.

"I don’t understand why do you think that about me…"

"I understand that you don’t understand it, but don’t forget a detail: I don’t understand that you tell me certain things either. I mean…! A part of me, which is confident, accepts what you say and appreciates it, but another part of me, the most insecure, can’t, has no way, even less considering how much I admire your voice."

Nikita shakes his head.

"You are fantastic, there should be no trace of insecurity in you."

There’s silence; the dialogue, in some way, continues thanks to the looks. The light is very dim and the air smells like an old book; it’s an environment too ideal for both.

It feels intimate and it’s perfect.

"Nikita…"

"Yes?"

Kostyantyn sits on the floor.

"Could you… sing for me?"

"What?!"

"I told you in the letter that I wanted to help you! Well, this is the beginning of the help: let me hear you, please." He settles down with his hands on the floor on either side of his hips and leaning back. Nikita looks at him completely flushed. Then, smiling with obvious mischief, Kostyantyn sees the opportunity he has been waiting for: "Besides… Didn’t you stay for that? Or did you stay for something else?"

Nikita stops breathing for a moment. He swallows without knowing what to answer. Actually, he stayed because he lost nothing doing it, that’s all. Or not: he also stayed to look at Kostyantyn in another way.

He contemplates him sitting on the floor in his black and showy clothes, with his leather boots, with his inciting eyes nailed like two needles over his own pupils. Too tense to doing what Mr. Oleg has advised him, to look at him differently, Nikita nods.

He stands up, runs the chair to one side and prepares his throat a bit with warm-up exercises, while massaging his neck with one hand. When he does it, the spell happens: he can sing thanks to forgetfulness, because when he prepares his throat, it’s as if the world ceases to exist.

The image of Nikita touching his neck and exercising his voice is the most erotic to Kostyantyn’s eyes, meanwhile. He feels seduced without being able to avoid it; he knows that Nikita isn’t doing anything to provoke him, that the only one that provokes here is him with his indirect questions, but how inevitable to long for what he cannot do, to take him in his arms, to stick him to his body, to kiss him as if to do so was the secret of happiness.

Kiss him, and listen to him breathe with difficulty, and feel how he squeezes his waist with his hands…

Kostyantyn sighs. Nikita clears his throat and prepares to start.

What will he sing? Fortunately, Nikita tells him, at the beginning, that he has chosen the indicated song:

“ _Ni slova o lyubvi, ni slova o razluke_ …”

'I poletim' by Sofía Rotaru, the song that, since he knows him, for Kostyantyn it means everything what he feels.

How inevitable, suddenly, it’s not only to breathe, but to do it with difficulty.

" _I poletim_ …"

It’s wonderful.

He opens his eyes wider and frowns to concentrate; Kostyantyn gets mad before Nikita, who with one hand pretends to take a microphone and with the other emphasizes each word he utters. Notes how he squeezes his eyelids before certain words, how his hands and his voice tremble in a dreamlike gesture. Until the voice goes from soft to powerful, until it reaches parts that Nikita hadn’t completed that time, and then Kostyantyn discovers other facets in the voice, and the colours that it transmits go from white to blue, to a blue as dark as those of the bottom of the ocean. And sighs, stunned, when Nikita's voice rises in an impressive note and then finish singing in a barely audible murmur, suffocated by emotion, pierced by feelings too strong to be understood by too cold hearts.

That reach Kostyantyn’s conceptual heart with an overwhelming simplicity.

Kostyantyn applauds feeling a lump in his throat, because it’s a fact: he will never tire of listening to him.

Never.

And it’s then, when the applause fills the bookstore, that Nikita opens his eyes.

He sees the trembling image of Kostyantyn applauding excitedly, trembling because Nikita himself is doing so, and discovers another kind of image, because the smile, which is perfect as always, leads him to the little boy cheeks that Kostyantyn has, which leads him, in turn, to the forehead, to the hair, to the shoulders, to the hands, to the legs, to the height, to the chest, to the neck, to the eyes. And the eyes lead to the feelings that are read as clear as if only truths could shine there, and which discover a different reality before Nikita.

He's beautiful.

Kostyantyn is beautiful on the outside, breathtakingly beautiful, but what embellishes him even more are the emotions that in his eyes float like bubbles.

Without air, Nikita covers his mouth for the impression. Kostyantyn stands up, still applauding, he does so at a speed more noticeable than normal, and face to face they look at the other as the difference of heights allows, Nikita leaning up, Kostyantyn leaning down.

"Your voice is beautiful."

Nikita denies laughing like a child. The obvious becomes readable.

He has approached someone to him with his voice.

Someone is _listening_ to him, finally.

"I don’t want to be alone anymore…" he whispers with an emotion as powerful as that of his singing voice.

Then, what Kostyantyn would never have expected: Nikita hugs him strong, very strong, and sinks his face into his chest, which still beats for the blood that he has ingested very recently. Mélovin, therefore, remains asleep.

Kostya, for the hug, feels more alive than ever.

"Nikita…" Kostyantyn whispers, whose voice is pierced by too many emotions, for an overwhelming quantity and quality of them.

He hugs him by wrapping his arms around his shoulders; Nikita sinks his face deeper into his chest. How much seduces him Nikita's height, how he seems to be made to fit him, by the soft voice he has in contrast to his deep voice, by his dark and sweet eyes in contrast to his clear and sharp eyes, by his small and sweet boy’s body in contrast with the strengthened body of a _shadow_ that he possesses.

He squeezes him, sighs, holds tears, feels emotional. Snatched by a transcendental, deep feeling, Kostyantyn swears to himself and swears to Nikita at the same time:

"You will never be alone again," he says, kissing his forehead again and again, kissing him with the hope of endowing his words with all the truth they need to be believed.

Because he, happy to have an angel in his arms symbolizing the redemption to all his misfortunes, will not allow it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! Thanks for reading, really.
> 
> About the conversation, I wanted it to flow like any conversation in life, that it wasn't very linear, that many things were left in half. This scene continues in the next chapter; things that were pending here will be retaken there.
> 
> Nikita's premise remains that he has nothing to lose; this isn't, of course, a good symptom. But things will progress as long as he learns to allow it: in this I would like to focus during the next chapters, before the coming turn arrives. Also, it will not be so easy for him to accept what he feels; I think it would be common in his situation, with so much anguish inside and so lost in what he wants to do with his own life. On the other hand, Mél needs to reconnect with Kostya, and for that he needs to sleep Mélovin. The problem is, he can do it? Can the vampire sleep to make the human prevail, or does he have to accept that both are faces of the same coin? That's a little what comes immediately.
> 
> I hope you like it. : ')
> 
> I want to dedicate this chapter to those who always support me by the simple fact of being there, on the other side: Di, Blake, Kostya Anon, Jadoremelekseev, Cuddlyein ... ¡GRACIAS! THANK YOU! Спасибо!
> 
> See you soon. I hope to upload next monday. ♥


	8. VII

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Will they find each other between the fog?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Forgive my English, please. This chapter was very difficult.
> 
> THANK YOU SO MUCH. ♥

**VII**

 

Once, he had loved. That person, the same person whom he could consider his vampiric progenitor, made him fallen in love with him in all forms, from all approaches, in the internal and external, in the crucial and the ephemeral.

All for those damn words.

" _The world is a fog, Kostya. People are blinded, they see nothing, they don’t distinguish, but sometimes we can see someone in the distance; we do it not because we can see suddenly, but because we hear first._

_Listening to a crying heart isn’t something that everyone can do; it requires too much empathy for that. However, there’re those who know how to do it._

_That's why, Kostya, that you and I met. My heart called you, you came to me, your eyes opened and even the thickest fog couldn’t avoid it._

_We feel each other through the fog, Kostya._

_We will never be alone inside it again._ "

After the _curse_ , of being trained by Artem, of Mother’s lessons, of the dissociation with Mélovin, of the deepening of dehumanization, Kostyantyn couldn’t feel something like that again.

When he became a _shadow_ , all he could feel was the same that he had always felt: he was in the fog, yes, but no one could feel him inside it.

 _Shadows_ are erotic creatures by nature; they dedicate a large part of their existences to the exaltation of the highest passions. Usual is seeing groups of _shadows_ glued to each other in oscillating erratic movements, voluptuous _shadows_ hidden in the dark corridors of the _network_ , from which unbridled sounds of the most sublime pleasure come off while, in the air, floats the sweet scent of blood that everyone spills for everyone.

He has never been good for that.

He has witnessed complete acts, he has joined more than once, but the experience doesn’t drive him crazy in spite of knowing that the _shadows_ can satisfy _all_ kinds of passions.

He’s sweeter than what Mélovin wants to show when he joins.

He needs to feel another kind of pleasure, the one that, first, vibrates inside the conceptual heart, and which by that first vibration leads to everything else. He wants something like when he loved who was responsible for everything, but real.

Seek to vibrate not in the most sensitive points of his dehumanized body; vibrate to the depths of his feelings, in his deepest waters, where loneliness reigns with an iron fist, at that exact point where he has never managed to see anyone else.

He wants what he has right now, in short: a delicate one-seventy-something body trembling against his chest; a smile that blinds him every second a little more.

A human being that he can feel like no other despite how blinded, by the fog, he is.

"Why are you breathing?" Nikita asks as he looks at him. He smiles at him, but most of all he looks curious, surrounded by a sweet veil of shyness, the same as always when it comes to him.

Flaunting that seduction that he pretends when the _shadow_ is immersed in a group of _shadows_ , Kostyantyn caresses with astonishing slowness the mole that Nikita has under his right eye. At this point, this mole means almost a fetish for him. Nikita's reaction, to his most pleasant surprise, oscillates between shame and longing.

Is it possible that this…?

"Well, why not?" he says with some mischief. "I don’t need it, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t do it."

They look at each other, and what a noise while they do it, what a wild clash of broken breaths while they contemplate to the other for long minutes that it feels like a sum of the most ephemeral instants. Because nothing seems to reach now, nothing is enough to satisfy this need to overcome the loneliness that, for different reasons, has condemned them to years of similar pain. And it’s that loneliness isn’t about not knowing anyone, about not loving anyone, about not having anyone; loneliness is felt even when there’re people around, in uniform and invincible crowds.

To be alone is to feel something that nobody else feels.

However, Kostyantyn wants to believe in what he believed when he was human, that someone will be able to see him through the fog, that someone will see him and will know, by finding him, reaching him, touching him, embracing him, that until that moment he has been blind.

That, in the fog, despite how dense it’s among so many people and so many lies, it’s possible to open the eyes and _see_.

"And since we are with questions, little sir..." Kostyantyn closes his eyes for a moment while his middle finger draws subtle circles around Nikita's mole. How warm he feels his skin, almost as warm as the sweet breath that constantly strikes his mouth. Opens his eyes, and Nikita looks at him with the most pronounced blush. "Why did you hug me?"

Nikita's eyes open too much. Kostyantyn perceives, by having him stuck to him, how his body tenses. He loses the playful smile when he notices it, also stops the circular movements of his middle finger; he becomes a bundle of nervousness, in Kostya and not in Mélovin.

However, Nikita, who seems not to notice how the fear has seized him, just looks down. In doing so, he smiles like a child.

Kostyantyn returns to the beginning, this way: quiet, he realizes that he doesn’t need to ask. The gesture is already legible, he has seen it enough times to understand it.

"Why do you grieve?" he asks, in love with the gesture and the tenderness he transmits to him.

Nikita looks at him one more time. Kostyantyn only suspects what, for Nikita, is a fact from beginning to end: how did the vampire to notice how embarrassed he is? Maybe it's very obvious, but not necessarily.

Because the gestures are like the fog although he doesn’t even suspect it: only the one who _listens_ besides _seeing_ them can read them.

Thinking about the dream of the moon crying blood, in the scene of the terrace, in the fear of the vertigo and the flicker lights, in Kostyantyn's internal and external beauty, Nikita knows that he has nothing to lose, but that doesn’t mean that it's simple.

He cannot let himself be carried away by the enthusiasm that the scene provokes him in the unshakable purity of his feelings; he must think.

But how…?

"I'm very… confused," Nikita says at last, perhaps embarrassed, but honestly.

Kostyantyn feels, because of the intimacy that they share between the two libraries, that it’s worth investigating. Perhaps, Nikita will be able to tell him more than Kostyantyn himself believed, even before seeing him today, to be able to hear from him.

"Why?” he asks.

Nikita repeats the gesture: looks down, smiles, and he's a child, and he's so pure that it hurts.

"Because…" A laugh to one side, embarrassed, overwhelmed, and Nikita tries to follow. "Y-You're a vampire and you wanted to kill me and then you gave me a letter to tell me that you want to help me."

Kostyantyn smiles, proud of himself despite the obvious untidiness.

"I did that."

"Well…" Nikita looks down again, but he doesn’t smile. There’s sadness in his gesture, that’s what Kostyantyn reads; there’s anguish and confusion in the frown. "Don’t you think it's normal to be confused?"

"What I thought was normal was that you didn’t stay: I was sure you wouldn’t. I mean, I did everything wrong and I know it," Kostyantyn confesses, pressing him a little closer, with both arms around his dropped shoulders. Notes that Nikita’s body, that who transmits the heat of a thousand suns in the most beautiful way, because he’s honest in his mere humanity, is more relaxed. To notice it returns the playful to his smile and the theatricality to his gestures; it gives him enough confidence to move on. "I know I made a serious mistake and I don’t need to repeat it, because I already explained it to you in the letter. Anyway, I apologize again, Nikita… I was confused too."

"But why? I… I don’t finish to understand it."

Since when to be like this, one stuck to the other, did it become easier for both of them? Kostyantyn knows that he doesn’t want to be detached from him, that he wants to take him to his coffin, sleep with him, wake up with him and do everything with him; He cannot, and he still doesn’t know how much it will hurt him not to be able to.

He responds with the naturalness of someone who knows he’s right:

"I told you: you remind me to me."

"But why?"

"I also told you: because I realized how lonely you feel and that moved me."

"But why…? What I don’t understand is…"

"What?"

"Why do you like my voice?"

He could overreact to that question, but Kostyantyn contains himself.

Give love and nothing else to him is what he craves, after all:

"The beauty of you, Nikita, is that you don’t realize what you transmit. I mean…! Many people, even if they say no and pretend not to, know what they transmit: I, for example, even though I have my insecure side, I also know that I’m good with the piano, that I know how to use my voice, that I have the enough experience to show me on stage; I don’t do it wrong, let's say. You have no idea and it drives me crazy in the best way. I think it's something precious about you."

"But…"

He squeezes a little more. Nikita, to his most pleasant surprise, also does it: he tightens the hug that has been giving all the time to him around the waist.

Happy for the contact and the person with whom he has it, Kostyantyn continues:

"I know it will cost you, because I was in your place and I know what it feels like, but you will achieve it, I have no doubts. It will take time, perhaps, and if you allow me, I will be with you in every part of the process; what you have to learn is to value your own feelings, to give them importance and not be discouraged by bad luck."

Nikita blinks repeatedly, frowns and looks to the side. Is he thinking about what he says? Is he trying to understand it?

"When I sing," Nikita says, still wrapped up in the last gesture, "it's not that I'm trying to express something in particular; I only sing, I do it naturally, because it comes out, because I need it, because it’s the only thing that I feel true about myself. I have never thought about what other people should feel when listening to me, I haven’t proposed to provoke something specific; I only sing and give through my voice the only thing that I have to offer."

"Your feelings."

"Yes. But no… They’re not enough. People don’t feel anything and I must accept it; I don’t have what it takes. I've never been able to achieve something with music and…"

"And what does it mean to 'to achieve something with music'?"

Nikita just throws himself back. Kostyantyn contains him by squeezing his shoulders.

"That they listen to you," he replies, "that they feel you, that you reach them."

With a half-smile, Kostyantyn nods.

"Then you have already achieved it."

A caress to the mole, and Nikita's eyes shine like two stars. In response, Kostyantyn kisses the mole with extreme delicacy, barely a touch of his lips. Afterwards, he forced himself to let him go despite not wanting to invite him to sit on the wooden chair. Nikita, with the face flooded with a feeling that Kostyantyn cannot decipher at all, that looks confused, but seems to hide too much behind, sits down.

Kostyantyn does the same, but on the floor, crossing one leg over the other.

"We'll come back to this in a moment, shall we? If you want, of course. But first tell me one thing, please."

Holding his knees with his hands, squeezing them in evident nervousness, Nikita nods.

"Why did you hug me?"

Nikita barely smiles.

"Because I wanted to," he replies without looking at him.

"Because you feel alone?"

"Because I feel grateful…"

Kostyantyn allows himself to smile with all the exaggeration possible. Grateful, with him! How much he honours him and how little he thinks he deserves such words.

"Despite what I did the last time?" he asks.

Nikita lifts his shoulders to drop them instantly. Kostyantyn understands that Nikita is more than confused; in fact, he has surrendered and nothing has changed.

"I have nothing to lose, I suppose… Although surely nothing good will come out of this; it's obvious, you're a vampire.” Like having fun with what he says, Nikita contains a laugh. "But your letter… moved me very much."

Kostyantyn looks at him with absolute attention, as if Nikita was the only living being on the Earth, or something like that, exaggerated and absurd, corny and perfect. So, it's about having nothing to lose…

"Nikita…"

"What?"

Containing the extreme need to embrace him, to kiss him, to give him all the love he can rescue from the deepest waters of his conceptual heart, Kostyantyn says it in a whisper that nothing but emotion it transmits:

"Why did you give up on music?"

Nikita watches him: he looks more serious than ever. Kostyantyn wonders what mysteries will lie behind the unhappiness that fills Nikita's eyes every time he’s not singing.

The reason for surrender.

Nikita sighs. Always with the premise of not losing anything, he says:

"I've always been alone."

Kostyantyn kneels before him. Without touching him, he remains centimetres from his knees, his eyes fixed on him.

"I've always been alone…" Nikita repeats with a sad smile on his lips.

"Why?" inquires Kostyantyn, whom empathy, in the eyes now equal, it looks genuine even in the vampiric features.

"I never met my dad…" Nikita wrinkles his mouth, as if trying to contain something, perhaps hasty words, perhaps a feeling too deep and intimate to be expressed. "He left. Before I was born, he left, and although I don’t feel any kind of resentment, the truth is that…"

"Nobody takes away the feeling of abandonment."

Tightening more his mouth in a gesture more mature than anguished, of understanding and not of despair, Nikita nods.

"Nobody…" he whispers looking towards nothing.

Kostyantyn wants to cry; his words about Wilde's story, which he hasn’t forgotten, take on a more transcendental meaning. What Nikita tells him, in a way as twisted as real, echoes him.

In his case, however, the absent figure was another.

"Because you feel he never cared," reflects Kostyantyn from his own experience, that of the fog and blind eyes before the sad mirages.

"Because you grow up knowing that you were rejected forever, and what's left after that? It's not any rejection, it's the one of who should never reject you," Nikita says. "Even if I don’t have hatred or resentment, because having them would drive me crazy, I don’t know… I've always had some problems, if I analyse it… All, absolutely all my relationships, maybe because of the fear at the end, the abandonment, have cost me too much. Because of my fears, all my relationships have ended badly."

Nikita smiles more when a lonely tear slowly pierces his left cheek.

"I took refuge in music," he says dryly. "I felt, maybe, that music would never leave me, that it would always be with me, that everything would go well simply because I loved it, but I never believed enough in myself, I was never able to achieve anything despite how much I tried it since I was little, learn, listen, study, practice…"

"And what happened?" Kostyantyn inquires almost on the verge of biting his own tongue, longing to embrace that angel again, to grasp him in his arms and convince him of how much he’s worth, of how much he means.

To convince him of not to choose the death that still seems to dance around him, urging him to let himself be defeated.

"I didn’t achieve anything…" Nikita wipes away the tear; in him, suddenly, springs a subtle, but genuine strength, which sinks Kostyantyn in a hope to which he clings with obstinacy. "I was in a lot of groups, I sang and I sang and I even went to silly TV castings, I tried everything, but one day I understood that if I hadn’t achieved anything then I would never achieve it, so I decided to went to one last casting: if they chose me, nobody would stop me, if they didn’t choose me, then the music wasn’t for me."

"And they didn’t…?"

"They didn’t choose me. That day, two years ago, I gave up forever: music, as well as my dad, friends, girlfriends, all… Just like _everyone_ , music left me. I left the group I was in, I concentrated in my - by then - new work in the bookstore and I never sang again, except when the nostalgia overcomes me and I go on stage at the bar…"

Kostyantyn doesn’t doubt:

"It was you who abandoned music."

Nikita, visibly resigned, nods while he squeezes one of his hands with the other.

"We abandoned each other, maybe… Or I never had music with me, because I never had enough talent to express it."

Kostyantyn smiles. Nikita's words echo again, but this time for another reason.

In this he knows, ineffably, that he’s right.

"It was you, but I don’t blame you: you have the talent to express it, you have it and I ask you not to refute it, because I know something about this, okay? Also, you shouldn’t be guided by the criteria of people who, if didn’t chose you, obviously don’t understand anything."

"But I'm not talking about improvised people. I mean prestigious people. If they didn’t see something in me, I mustn’t be a fool… It's not that they didn’t see it; it’s that I don’t have it."

The seriousness is absolute in each pair of eyes: none plays; the conviction is indisputable. It shows, in every look, a bit of bad temper, especially in Kostyantyn, that when it comes to music has the most bad temper of all.

"What you have and what you don’t have depends on who listen to you, not on your talent or lack of talent." Kostyantyn, crawling on the floor with his knees, moves a little closer to him. He rests his hands over Nikita's, who’s holding his knees again, and brings his face close to his. Although he knows that maybe he can be misinterpreted, because his gesture sounds like incitement, no: it's love. Because it’s useless to deny it: he wants him, he adores him, he feels too much for him. He knows that Kostya's eternally youth and innocent heart is guilty of this new beautiful mess, but he doesn’t care anymore. Coughs impersonating Kostya, nervous and anxious about the closeness of the faces, the eyes, the mouths. "If you allow me to give you my opinion, I think you have had bad luck. It's not about not having what it takes, because I know you have it; it's about you crossing over to the wrong people."

"But…"

He squeezes Nikita's hands; he feels him trembling under his hands.

"I'm very cold, right?" he asks, amused by the detail.

"You are…" Nikita replies. In his eyes there’s surprise, shame; on his cheeks, an adorable blush.

The presence of the blush distracts Kostyantyn for a moment, although he regains his concentration instantly.

"Nikita, it's about your fear, that your bad luck has filled you with fear and that's why you've abandoned music. It's about you’ve misinterpreted what, nowadays, everyone seems to misunderstand."

"What do you mean?"

"The numbers." Kostyantyn smiles as he remembers something. "Have you read _The little prince_?"

"Sure…" Nikita smiles with such tenderness that Kostyantyn only manages to see, in him, a child. That child, who’s still somewhere. The one who still has life, because he still feels. "Hasn’t someone not read it?"

"I know! It’s perfect. Do you remember the astronomer's part? The people live pending of the numbers: the weight, the age, the salary, the number of brothers. People don’t care about the tone of a person's voice, what games they prefer or if they collect butterflies…"

Nikita nods.

"I remember."

"Great. Do you know why I mention this to you? Because in these times, people live pending of the numbers more than ever. On YouTube, people notice not if the song is good, if it moves their hearts, if it reminds them to that dear old girlfriend or that beautiful afternoon hand in hand with their mothers, but the views. And how views deceive, that make you believe that 'achieving something' means reaching millions! When it isn’t about the amount of people reached thanks to a computerized system diagrammed by an unjust industry, but about the quality of the emotion that you are capable of transmit."

"What?"

Kostyantyn shows his teeth in an effusive smile. Nikita raves at the perfection that the vampire carries in his features, he does it more than he should.

"Numbers doesn’t always have to do with feelings, they often don’t coincide with the importance that someone attaches to something. As if your favourite song, whatever it may be, was less important just for having less visits than others! As if it deserves less to be your favourite for having twenty visits and not a billion… People are guided by the numbers, are currently configured in that way, and that makes us forget that, often, 'achieve something with music' means something else."

"What it means?" Nikita asks with a frown, concentrating on what Kostyantyn tells him, or that’s what he perceives.

"It means to thrill people, not to accumulate them in a view counter that has more to do with what the industry decides than with what moves the listeners. Whether a person or a thousand, whether a vampire kneeling before you or a stadium full of a moved audience, your feelings aren’t less important. Success is an invention of the industry! I understand that maybe you refer to living of making music, to music keeping your roof as well as being your passion, but this is about never give up, that you still have the voice and the feelings to keep trying."

Desperate, beside himself not by the desire to suck blood but by the need to express what he feels, Kostyantyn raises Nikita's hands and interlaces the fingers of all hands, the cold of one with the warm of the other. Nikita, rigid in his place, with his eyes wide open beyond the fog, lets himself hold and nothing else. Confused, he seems to want to say something; he keeps quiet, and Kostyantyn continues with an overwhelming vehemence:

"Nobody has the right to break your dreams, to convince you that they’re worthless. Nobody has the right to make you believe that what matters is the number and not the feeling! We all wanted that ideal scenario, to be Freddy Mercury before that infinite audience changing the world with his voice, but to have only a bunch of people doesn’t make it less significant! A bunch of people doesn’t diminish the meaning nor does it mean that tomorrow that number will cannot increase thanks to your effort! That it will be wonderful, but you shouldn’t consider a failure or lack of talent not to have meet the right people, you have to value more your own feelings and also those who don’t lie to you when tell you that you moved them. I was as discouraged as you were, I thought that being _this_ was going to stop my dreams, but in my community (there’re more _shadows_ , but I can’t speak to you in depth about this, forgive me) I was able to find interest, affection and respect. I have some fans! I've played in many countries… It's not the stadium and I'm not Freddy Mercury, but I value every gaze of emotion I see from the stage. I’m free to say what I feel, far from that damn industry, and I’m satisfied! Don’t get blinded by your erroneous beliefs, don’t lock yourself in that idea that you don’t deserve anything; you deserve it, and _I'm listening to you_. Because…"

Kostyantyn stops: he has stared so much at Nikita as he spoke at the speed of light that he has forgotten to notice something other than the perpetual but beautiful darkness of his black pupils. As he looks further, he discovers sweet tears shining on his eyes, sliding down his cheeks, and a soft, humble, but genuine smile on the sweetest mouth he has ever kissed.

"That's why I hugged you," Nikita says in a sweet little boy's murmur, "because I thought, well… ‘This boy was really touched when he heard me, maybe I was the one who attracted him thanks to my voice. that allowed me to attract him, and if that’s true, it means that my voice, finally, could do it’…" Nikita looks down, as always, and the smile he shows is the most charming that the vampire’s eyes have ever seen. "Kostyantyn…"

Upon hearing his name in Nikita's voice, Kostyantyn feels that he has reached a state of happiness unknown until now. He feels that the bond is reinforced, that the roots of the bond extend to the centre of the Earth, and nothing more than a sigh succeeds in releasing in response. It's too much.

It’s everything.

"What?" he asks, pretending gallantry; in fact, he’s no more than a teenager full of illusion, a virgin before an idealized situation, discovering for the first-time feelings of such transcendence that describing them would be, after all, impossible.

"Thank you…"

And that simple sentence makes Kostyantyn’s world change, transform, rise towards a natural evolution; it causes the fog to dissipate, to disappear from the world in order to show, before him, the brightest light. And it comes from Nikita: everything comes from him.

He _is_ the light.

"Don’t thank me," he says, despite how much he’s feeling as he looks at him, squeezes him and discovers, beyond blind eyes, another kind of hidden life, "I only ask you to think about it… No…!" He laughs, he contains the blood that tries to escape from his eyes, he looks at the interlaced hands and feels his cheeks swell in his face. It's too much, yes, and it's more than everything. "Nikita, never give up," he says, and he contemplates him as that angelic being that so much seems to be, "what I wanted to tell you is that if what you need to keep singing is to someone who listens to you, I will do it whenever you want. I will give you my opinions, I will applaud you, I will do everything you ask me while you let me listen to you. Even if you want a critic, I will do everything to be objective and I will give it to you! If having an audience helps you to recover your courage and keep trying, if what you need is a look that allows you to abstract from yourself and to value yourself, to know yourself and help yourself to fight, I will be that someone. I will be your audience, all those people in the stadium at the same time! I will be everything you need in your life!"

" _Everything_ …?" Nikita, blushing but smiling, calmer than the tremor seemed to indicate before Kostyantyn’s crazy eyes, asks in a soft, sweet voice, of an angel shaped with paintings made on the basis of innocence.

Kostyantyn suddenly realizes that this question is more ambiguous than it sounds. Tense as a little boy, his cheeks are so swollen that he’s ashamed: Nikita is looking at him in a different way that he has no ability to read, which is new.

As he can, inquires with trembling voice:

"W-Well… I didn’t miss the 'girlfriends' you said before… But I will not push you to anything, we can be friends and… You know! It's not like I'm telling you all this because… although… Mmm…"

He bites his lip to keep quiet; he surpassed a limit. Nikita didn’t say anything ambiguous, it's just his imagination, how obvious now that he thinks about it! How obvious that he imagined things, because what matters is that Nikita is fine, that he goes ahead, that he recovers the motivation to fight and doesn’t stay locked in the shadows of surrender, because…

Two thumbs caress his hands with an unprecedented shyness, as marked as the emotion that floats in the air. They’re two warm, soft thumbs, as sweet as the face and features and gaze of the one to whom they belong. Kostyantyn cannot react; for a moment, he’s as paralyzed as if Nikita were the _shadow_ and him the human at his mercy.

And Nikita finally asks:

"Why did you kiss me?" Kostyantyn watches him, stupefied. "You didn’t explain it in the letter…"

In fact, no, he didn’t explain it in the letter, neither that time on the terrace, when he sucked blood from his lip. He didn’t have to kiss him, not to suck his blood, and have told him what he had just said about the 'girlfriends' and be friends and not push him and…

What the hell was he thinking?!

"Well, you…" He looks at the hands again: Nikita keeps caressing him, he does it with trembling hands that transmit a scorching heat. Notice it, stare at their hands so hard, it takes away all the words from him. However, he continues as he can, untidily: "I will not deny that you are… very…"

"Very what?" Nikita asks as he stops the caress that he gives with the thumbs, and then he resumes it with irregularity.

Kostyantyn feels that he loses control not as a _shadow_ , because Mélovin continues fed and sleeping; he goes mad as a human, and all the instincts that come to him come from Kostya.

He looks at him, and the answer comes to him because he can read it in the dark eyes that so sweetly and timidly observe him.

"You're beautiful. Or haven’t you seen yourself in the mirror?" Kostyantyn realizes, when he says it, that he has achieved the indicated average, that Kostya keeps humanity intact while Mélovin, even when he sleeps, contributes in some way to character and seduction. Yes, he has achieved it perfectly! And provoking is all what he needs now, because Nikita's caresses seem to need that. "I mean… Look at you! You’re beautiful; anyone, sane or not, _shadow_ or human, would like to kiss you."

Nikita frowns and looks to the side. Is he analysing what Kostyantyn has told him? That’s what this one asks himself when observing him. Far from understanding what’s happening in the complexity that constitutes Nikita, who fears abandonment more than death, who needs to reconcile with his feelings to be reconciled with music, which is caressing the cold hands of a vampire who he cannot stop looking at, listening, missing, because Mr. Oleg was right: thanks to being in the situation, to allowing himself to look at Kostyantyn in a different way, he has understood what hasn’t been done before, and the discovery is no less overwhelming than the rest of the information.

He only knows that he wants to see that colour again, the red colour that Kostyantyn's beautiful voice has as its essence, as red as the fiercest fire, as blood, as love.

He likes him.

Frowning like that, Nikita is thinking about that, that Kostyantyn likes him, and he shouldn’t. Because he’s a man, of course, because he still has prejudice in his heart and skin, and because he’s a vampire or _shadow_ or whatever they’re called, and because he’s dangerous given his non-person nature, and for too many reasons that, in the confusion he has, it would be impossible to enumerate.

But he likes him.

But his own nature triumphs, since his heart, always so afraid of the end, wants a new beginning. Because no matter how many times everything goes wrong: he still wants to feel, still needs it given his sensitive nature, which needs to remain in its natural state, that of mere emotion, to survive, and Kostyantyn is the owner of that red voice that so much has caused him, despite being a man, despite being a supernatural being.

And that’s the problem. Are these caresses good?

It’s okay to accept Kostyantyn's proposal?

Soon, he discovers something that bristles his skin. When he bristles completely, breathes as deep as his lungs allow.

It’s the most important point of all:

"And can I be your audience too?"

The question is stuck in Kostyantyn’s heart as the stake in Carmilla's before her inevitable end.

"If you want, well… I'd love it."

When Nikita smiles at him, the caresses of the thumbs resume.

Like it or not, they know that this will not end now.

It only remains to know what both ask themselves at the same time: to what extent do they want to be involved with the other? To what extent can this nascent bond be extended?

"Nikita…"

"What?"

"Why are you caressing me?"

"Because I need it."

"Because you need it?"

"Because I want to understand what I feel."

"And what have you understood?"

"Not much…"

They laugh. Looking at each other again, Kostyantyn's cold thumbs begin to caress Nikita's hands. The smiles that remain as a hangover from the previous laughs turn into surprise in Nikita and conviction in Kostyantyn.

"What can I do to help?"

The seduction is evident: Kostyantyn is not holding back; each word denotes a double intention. On the one hand, he wants to know what Nikita feels, while on the other he wants to take the caresses to another level, to investigate beyond what floats in the air and so clear it seems despite how much confusion accompanies them.

Tense, Nikita laughs. Kostyantyn discovers that he loves his laugh almost as much as his voice.

After all the sadness he has seen him, yes, he loves it.

"I don’t know," Nikita says, looking at their hands. "I never lived something like this and…"

"You've never been with a guy?"

Kostyantyn looks for him: when Nikita is cornered by the blue of those two deep oceans, he laughs nervously. Afterwards, he swallows, feeling his cheeks heat up with shyness.

"Never," he replies in a voice thread.

"And are you… curious to know how it feels?" Kostyantyn asks, smiling, daring, determined to investigate. "Because if you need a guide, well… I can help you."

Nikita laughs again. The nervousness is notorious, but also is complicity. It’s notorious, above all, the chemistry that between their skins seems to flow with a force as natural as those blue oceans that move his heart with fierceness.

Kostyantyn squeezes his hands. When he looks at him in response, Nikita feels how his whole skin, all of it, from head to toe, bristles at the same time. Just as when he was embraced, he lacks of air, and his thoughts come and go and nothing causes more than a subtle dizziness. The skin that burns, despite of being bristled as if he were exposed to the cold winter, reduces him to a dream state as powerful as sweet.

He has grown up in a conservative society: the common thing, of course, is a man guiding a woman, that’s the role of a man in a relationship. He knows that this is only a prejudice of the world that youth have as a mission to tear down, that to think of the union of two complex humanities in such simple and unjust terms is to underestimate humanity itself, but prejudice is still part of him.

Being guided and not being the guide, in some way, seduces him to limits that are unknown, but that have been manifested with the power of a thousand bombs in his imagination.

"Do you want me to be your guide, little sir?" Kostyantyn whispers against his mouth, too far gone to stop, too hungry from the emotional and therefore from the physical (the perfect harmony, the harmony with which he’s so identified) as to surrender. "It will not cost me anything; I just need your permission to do it."

Nikita feels that everything is mixed: the emotion of the audience before the audience and the artist before the artist, the vertigo of being seduced by a supernatural being, the longing to understand why he can no longer breathe, the direction in which his skin tries to leave.

Towards Kostyantyn.

Towards the vampire that holds his hands so much and that nothing else that touching him needs to turn his existence a thousand times.

Overwhelmed but intrigued, seduced in an inconceivable way by the idea of the different role, Nikita nods trembling more than when he’s singing.

Kostyantyn, happy for the answer, agrees as well. Too happy to stop, he urges Nikita to get up and take him by the hands. He advances towards him, runs the chair with one leg and corners him against the last library. Sees, behind Nikita, names of storytellers, one next to each other, Munro, Borges, Bukowski, Poe. In the last one he stops when listening the same thing that he perceives against his torso: Nikita’s heart, runaway, is as agitated as his breathing. Tells, the heart, how much is the uncertainty and how much the emotion. It doesn’t take long to feel pressured: to guide him, he must give him the best kiss in history, the best of all, the most perfect, caring, sweet but passionate. The best kiss, yes; the situation doesn’t merit less than that.

"A human doesn’t resist what a _shadow_. We can’t get intimate with them,” Artem says in his memory, suddenly, as always.

Kostyantyn hesitates, knowing that he cannot, that he doesn’t want to hurt Nikita, but Mélovin is still asleep.

If he tries to kiss him while being so well fed, if he measures to what extent he can stand it…

If he exalts the need to protect him, to take care of him, to give him the love he deserves instead of craving to kill him…!

Nikita's breathing hits his mouth; his eyes, bright with the tears that haven’t finished drying yet, look at him wide open; his hands, trembling, hold him by the clothes on each side of his waist; his lips, half open, wait for him painted with uncertainty.

Nothing he craves more, Kostyantyn discovers, that spend an eternity and more in that place, in that bookstore, surrounded by those books, in the company of that angel.

"Don’t be scared by what I'll do: I'll take care of you." He kisses the mole that he loves so much and feels how Nikita trembles beneath his lips. He feels so hungry for so many things that he can barely understand how he will do what he has so fervently promised. "I'll just do it to relax you."

"What…?" Nikita tries to ask, too hypnotized by the blue oceans of Kostyantyn's eyes, which look at him without blinking, fixed, and don’t let go, and seduce him, and scare him, and confuse him. It’s the vertigo of before, but not because he feels that he will die; it’s the vertigo that the eyes open before him provoke, the sensation of falling to the depths of the oceans, of sinking into the deepest waters of the heart that he feels throbbing through the eyes. That which, he understands, shouldn’t beat.

But it beats.

Kostyantyn snaps the fingers of his right hand smiling with cunning: the only light on flickers and goes away.

Nikita doesn’t react: Kostyantyn's mouth is on his, squeezing.

Without air or reason, Nikita is only allowed to let him: without releasing the clothes from which he’s held, hr breathes unevenly over Kostyantyn's mouth, which gives him superficial kisses, one, two, three, accurate as arrows giving in the central point, slow, soft. It only takes a second to Nikita to realize that it’s not enough.

That he wants more.

But is that okay? But is that wrong…?

Kostyantyn takes his time: he must go slowly for the two’s sake, especially Nikita's, but how difficult is to keep calm and not speed up the kiss, not to sink his mouth into the other mouth, how difficult because of the heat that the skin of Nikita's lips spreads, that need to want to scream until he’s hoarse, to want to kiss until his skin is consumed, to want to touch until the sun turns him into ashes. What a great need of all for the work and grace of the feeling that overwhelms him, but what a monumental enjoyment to do what he does, to give kisses and kisses to Nikita's parted lips, to kiss him on the upper lip, on the lower lip, on one corner, on the other, or on the cheek, or on the jaw. What perfection to touch his skin, slowly, very slowly, and know that he will never want to stop doing it.

Because it’s impossible to desire something similar against that skin, against that breath and against the heart that, desperate, shouts that the feeling is more mutual than what they want to believe.

Kostyantyn laughs against Nikita's mouth, he does it, and Nikita’s arms, though slightly shy, surround his neck as he stretches up. Kostyantyn laughs more, and kisses him, and Nikita laughs with him, and without being able to see absolutely nothing, they feel, at the same time, how they kiss each other. There’s no sensuality, desire, arousal, passion; there’s innocence, one too similar to be casual.

The fog dissipates, ceases to exist. And despite the differences between one and the other, despite the darkness of one and the light of the other, there’s a complement in the difference. It’s a yin yang, and it’s not accidental, and nothing is.

Kostyantyn chokes an ‘I love you’ in his throat that would be too hasty right now. But how real he does perceive it for that magical moment, kissing an angel that’s only light like a teenager who doesn’t know how to kiss.

Only remains what they do: keep kissing, keep laughing, keep feeling.

Because the fog, in the perfection of a mutual feeling, has no way of perpetuating itself. Because the fog no longer exists.

Because they will not be alone anymore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! I apologize if this chapter it's too long and/or too bad: this last days were difficult to me and put me in a very sensitive state. All that sensibility it's trapped here.
> 
> Sorry about that. 
> 
> This translation was like crying blood. I hope to get better someday. 
> 
> Thank you so much. If you want to hear some music while reading, I recommend Не одинокая by Mél with the last part. I wrote the chapter before reading the lyrics. When I searched the meaning it becomes the most perfect song for this chapter and my life. :')
> 
> THANK YOU! Thank you with all my heart and soul for reading my nonsense. 
> 
> THANK YOU FOREVER. ♥


	9. VIII

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kostyantyn needs to think; Nikita needs to let himself carried away. Meanwhile, someone else, from the darkest shadows, needs to find what he lost thirty-two years ago...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Forgive my English, please. I will reread this chapter during the weekend. I felt so dizzy with my English today... 
> 
> Sorry. 
> 
> Thanks for reading. ♥

He bends over the edge of the building with his thin, long, delicate legs of an eternal boy and looks at Kiev, the sweet Kiev which has reached the first snow of the season. The snow falls on the city in slow motion, aesthetically; a soft, sweet smile is drawn on his mouth when observing it.

He raises his hands on each side of his body like a sorcerer ready to enchant the whole world from above. Sees how all the lamp posts that surround the office building where he’s standing blink at the same time.

"Kostya…” he whispers with red tears covering his eyes while the light goes, returns, goes. His smile is deformed by the brutal happiness that he experiences until the most inconceivable limits of his heart, one that’s as conceptual as that of any _shadow_. "Kostya, it was about time…"

He throws himself into the void without fear or remorse. He has waited thirty-two years for this, to tell him the truth, to express what he feels, to return to the original plan. Because having convictions means that you’re right, that you defend your position from everything, from everyone.

For that reason, for him, the story was different and another was responsible.

"You came back…!" he shouts with his arms outstretched like a bird, falling among the snow of the sweet and white Kiev.

Kostya came back, yes.

He came back for _him_ , finally.

Where he will belong forever.

.

.

.

 

**VIII**

 

There’re too many things about Nikita that fascinates him, too many, but being able to kiss him and touch him, have another kind of contact with him, a more intimate and deeper, doesn’t do more than open the perspectives before him. He likes it so much everything what he discovers while kissing him that he’s reduced to being an addicted in front of an unexpected overdose. Nikita means an excess that is, due to his vampiric nature, extremely dangerous.

But how impossible to let go. How impossible because of the happiness that comes from having him so close.

There’s about twelve or thirteen centimetres in height difference between them; He’s not sure, but they’re enough to feel him tiny in his arms. And how much he exaggerates, because he’s not tiny at all! But this is what he feels about Nikita as he tries to hold him by kissing him with his arms entangled behind the back of his neck, his face completely tilted upwards, perhaps even on tiptoe. Kostyantyn laughs as he kisses him and, helped by the darkness in which they’re sunk, he carries one hand to the base of his back and the other to his waist. Squeezes, he does it gently, and leans towards him to allow Nikita to access to his lips more freely, without so many complications due to his lower height.

Nikita sighs against his mouth, perhaps relieved, perhaps for no particular reason, but he does it, and how ideal it’s all what surround them, the darkness, the cold of the environment in contrast to the warmth that they share, the smell of old books that seduce them, separated from the rest of the universe inside that tiny bookstore.

In a rapture of mere joy, Kostyantyn pulls him against his chest and lifts him up like a feather. He keeps him thus, trapped, while the kiss progresses little by little; while the kiss it’s limited to being, at this moment, a constant rubbing of moist, soft lips, complementing in an image as beautiful as intolerable.

Kostyantyn downs Nikita, corners him against one library just as at the beginning, and leaves his lips not without sharing with him a deep sigh.

Agitated, they remain embraced in the midst of darkness.

"Are you okay?" Kostyantyn whispers while kissing Nikita intermittently. The darkness is such that neither of them is able to see anything than a sketch of the other.

"Yes…" Nikita replies. He’s so well that he doesn’t know if he’s there; he’s so happy, so excited, he feels so seduced that it’s impossible to answer anything. He only can wish to go further.

He just needs a kiss more…

"Do you want me to continue?"

Nikita feels guilt when he perceives in his own skin how much excited he's by the question. He blinks confused by the need joined to the dizziness, and the lack of air, and everything. When Kostyantyn stops kissing him, his heart screams in the form of beats.

He doesn’t want to be alone anymore! And he doesn’t want another person…!

"Go on…" he whispers in a barely audible voice that nothing but anxiety denotes.

Kostyantyn perceives it. Enchanted by this angel who’s rather a sorcerer, he kisses once more his lips, but he keeps them pressed with his. But he opens them, as Nikita has done, and sneaks between them with the naturalness of those who return home, who return to the place from which they never should leave.

When he hugs Nikita, when he puts his arms around his waist, Kostyantyn holds him close while caressing him. He wants so many things, he wants to deform so many concepts! He wants to make the things easier, that going beyond is not taboo, that the idea of squeezing him more, of kissing him more, of wanting him more, doesn’t lead him to perdition.

Unfortunately, he discovers, it's not that simple.

Behind Nikita's back, he squeezes his right fist with supernatural strength as he perceives that Mélovin, the _shadow_ , yearns to wake up.

Stops the kiss very reluctantly, because nothing wants but to continue.

But, of course, nothing has more priority for him than protecting Nikita.

The light returns; Nikita looks at him, impressed.

"Something’s wrong?" he asks with the softest of voices.

Mélovin nothing longs more, on the other hand, than sink the teeth in those beautiful lips.

"I'll explain it to you later: it's… something complex to say." Kostyantyn puts his hands in his pockets; his face doesn’t hide the disappointment that it means for him to have stopped. "But don’t you think badly: it's not for you."

"Does it have to do with who you are?"

Touched by being understood in such a sweet way, Kostyantyn nods.

"I must go for today, Nikita…"

To his surprise, because he was afraid to hurt him for telling him the latest, he sees Nikita's mouth with a sympathetic smile.

"It's okay, don’t worry," he says, and how wonderful it’s to see him smile like that.

So true as opposed to all the pain that Kostyantyn has already seen in him, in his more than human factions.

"Shall we go?" Kostyantyn asks as he extends a hand.

Nikita holds it without hesitation, which sinks the _shadow_ in deep concern.

He’s determined to make this work.

The question is… Will it?

Kostyantyn puts on the scarf that he has left on the table from which Nikita attends while he puts on his own coats, a long black coat and the grey scarf that Kostyantyn has already seen on him. He also sees Nikita putting on wool gloves; how beautiful he looks so warm, it makes him look sweeter than ever.

Why does he have to be like this? Kostyantyn punishes his own attitude: he’s getting too carried away, in excess, but to tell the truth everything has gotten out of hand: he didn’t think to find Nikita there.

Less thought about ending the night as he finished it, kissing him in the dark after swearing to him that he will never be alone again.

“Kostyantyn…?”

He looks up when he hears Nikita: he has turned off everything, and he awaits him next to the door with the keys in hand and a smile on his lips. Kostyantyn smiles at him too, and tries to disguise as much as possible the anxiety that has just become his universe.

Looks at the clock: it's midnight. How fast, for the joy, the hours have gone.

When leaving, the surprise: it’s snowing. Kiev, slowly, is painted in white for the first time in the season. Nikita looks at the snow with a smile before closing the bookstore; Kostyantyn, away for so many years from his country, advances towards the street feeling in the presence of this snow a sort of message.

Together with Nikita, in Ukraine, he’s finally at home. Finally…

"It’s too soon, isn’t it?" Kostyantyn whispers, amazed.

"Maybe a little, but you know how the weather is lately…"

They look at each other standing at the edge of the street: the snow falls between them and begins to be notice in the shoulders, in the hair, in everything that’s around them.

"Do you want… walk to my apartment with me?" Nikita asks shyly.

And to look and to feel the snow next to him? Kostyantyn nods with eyes infested with enthusiasm. Nothing he could desire more.

To be able to stop thinking about the fine print and enjoy this whole, what he feels, Ukraine, this boy born in the Ukraine that he loves, this restarting that the whole situation seems to symbolize at this point of his conceptual life.

"Sure."

They walk in silence. Kostyantyn watches as Nikita puts on the hood of his coat. Looks like an adorable doll. For noticing him so childish, Kostyantyn makes the question that he always forgets:

"Nikita…"

"Tell me.”

"How old are you?"

Nikita smiles.

"Twenty-five, why?"

Kostyantyn stops walking.

"What?!"

Nikita stops three steps after him. Turns around laughing.

"You don’t believe me?" he asks, amused by the surprise that betrays the vampiric face.

"I… I thought you have twenty, and twenty as much!"

Nikita longs a laugh.

"You’re crazy."

"That means that you were born in…?"

"Ninety-three."

"You look younger."

"You too."

"Really? I don’t look like a fifty-three years old guy?" Kostyantyn asks as he moves elegantly down the street.

Nikita follows him; he laughs without pause, with an overwhelming charm.

What a fortune, for Kostyantyn, that he looks so happy just before his eyes.

When they go back together, they talk, or rather, Kostyantyn keeps asking some things. Thus, he learns that Nikita was born in the same Kiev in which they are, although he lived in other parts of Ukraine before finally returning. He talks about his holidays in Murcia during his childhood, his singing lessons, his fanaticism to different groups and artists, and when he understood that music was what he wanted for his life:

"I was in school, I wasn’t more than eight years old. I was tired of studying what I was studying, I think it was Biology or something, and I don’t know… I could only want to get home and sing, put on the radio and sing with screams…"

Kostyantyn smiles.

"Beautiful…”

They cross another street. To Kostyantyn's surprise, now is Nikita who asks:

"And you?"

"Me?"

"When did you realize that it was music what you want?"

Kostyantyn sighs. He lowers his jaw, keeps his hands in his pockets, smiles with explicit nostalgia, and Nikita, at his side, cannot help perceiving a certain aura of sadness around him. He still cannot forget that Internet site about crimes, his photo next to a tree in Odessa, the mental image of a boy's bed stained with blood.

Suddenly, Nikita wonders if Kostyantyn has suffered a lot in the past, but cannot think too much about it; Kostyantyn responds with a charming smile on his lips:

"I was in school too, locked in the music auditorium, where I was always hidden: the kids made fun of me outside, but everything stopped hurting, disturbing, when I played the piano. When I was alone with this one, the universe ceased to exist. One afternoon, after having a horrible argument with another student when I tried to defend myself, in vain, only there I was able to calm down; I was too nervous, but the piano was the most beautiful consolation. That afternoon, I knew that the music had saved me and that it would always save me…"

Nikita doesn’t repress the caress that he gives to him in one arm; Kostyantyn, still smiling, thanks by nodding subtly.

It feels good to talk about these things. It feels good for both of them.

They keep walking, and Nikita, spying on Kostyantyn out of the corner of his eye, returns to the previous question: has he suffered? Has cried? Has felt devastated by the most overwhelming loneliness?

Recalling what he said in the bookstore, what he had thought when he became a vampire, that his story with music had ended forever, Nikita wondered, at last, if Kostyantyn had been converted against his will.

Was that possible?

Because if he didn’t want to convert, that means that he…

That someone…

"Nikita!" they listen at the same time.

They look towards the street, where a red car goes in slow motion next to them. Nikita gets as red as the car when he sees Mr. Oleg at the steering wheel, alone.

His boss in person was laughing before him.

"S-Sir!" Nikita exclaims looking at the ground with a nervous laugh, coming out not only through his mouth, but even through his pores, or at least that’s what he feels, ashamed by an external look finding him with his particular companion.

"I'm glad to see you so happy, hey," Mr. Oleg says nodding to Nikita and Kostyantyn with an almost paternal pride. "Remember to enjoy your vacations _a lot_ , okay? And you!" he says to Kostyantyn, "Nikita is a good boy, be nice with him."

Nikita, about to explode with shame, turns and looks at the wall of the old-fashioned building that’s next to him.

To his surprise, he listens how Kostyantyn responds:

"Of course, sir!"

"Great! Be well!”

It’s not until he hears the car leaving that Nikita dares to look at Kostyantyn: he finds him laughing with obvious mischief.

"He’s my… boss… and…"

"Did you take vacations?" Kostyantyn asks.

"He forced me to take the ones that I didn’t take for two years, and…"

A Kostyantyn’s arm surrounds him in the middle of the empty street. Nikita wonders how the hell this has happened, why Mr. Oleg is so late in the street, when he remembers that there’s a theatre nearby and he loves to go on Fridays because they present works prepared by a popular improvisation group that…

"So, you'll be in your apartment _every day_ for a few weeks, _Niki_?"

 _Niki_? And that nickname? When he looks at Kostyantyn, he looks as seductive as in the bookstore, something that, for a moment, makes the floor tremble and vertigo return, although the latter does it in a different way, in a way that, he must admit, it feels nice for some reason.

He will have to think about too many things when returns to his apartment.

"Yes," he responds with a somewhat unsettled breathing.

"Great…"

Kostyantyn kisses him on his mole and moves away from him. Without further ado, he continues walking. After the shock allows it, Nikita reaches him by walking faster.

Before reaching him, a chill run through him.

He stops for a moment; then, he goes on.

It must be the cold that the snow has brought with it as it does every year.

They walk while Nikita talks to Kostyantyn about Mr. Oleg, that businessman full of money who enjoys culture as nobody, who goes to the theatre, who goes to the cinema, who goes to exhibitions, to some of the many museums in Kiev, and that he enjoys books as much as the two of them.

"I appreciate him, he's very kind and…"

"And he has an open mind."

"Yes…"

"That makes me happy."

Nikita nods. He owes a lot to that detail.

He thinks about telling Kostyantyn, telling him how Mr. Oleg has been fundamental in his decision of waiting for him, but the road isn’t enough: when paying attention to the street, he finds himself in the corner of where his building is.

"I leave you here," Kostyantyn tells him.

Nikita watches Kostyantyn next to him, smiling, so beautiful, so talented. There’s a lot that he doesn’t know about him yet and he’s still a mysterious and dangerous creature, but how much illusion makes him have known him, how much consolation and how much tenderness he transmits to him.

For today, he’s not able to think about anything else.

"Thanks for the walk."

"Thanks for giving you another chance." Kostyantyn strokes his shoulder with lovely warmth despite the cold that covers his entire skin. "I promise to help you, _Niki_ …"

That nickname again? Nikita laughs like a child.

"Okay, Kostya."

Unknowingly, Nikita has called him as he calls the vestiges of humanity that he still has alive in some point of his conceptual heart, trapped in the deepest waters of his being. It's part of having been heard in the fog, maybe.

And he loves it. He loves that Nikita calls him in that way.

"Do you want to come to my home tomorrow?" Nikita asks, not without shyness, not without doubts.

Kostyantyn nods, happy.

"I'll be here."

They arrange schedules and agree to see each other inside Nikita's apartment. Then, gazing the other, the need to kiss taints the air.

Kostyantyn makes that the street lights blink; he kisses him only for a second.

When the light returns, the _shadow_ turns his back to the human, both Kostyantyn to Nikita and Mélovin to Kostya himself, and neither one nor the other looks back.

Alone in Kiev’s streets, Kostyantyn walks as much as he can to confuse temptation: what pain it means not to be with him. What a teenager pain, how desperate and stupid, but it’s inevitable.

When the light is discovered, you want no longer to go back to darkness.

He's too excited, in that way in what he just wants to play the piano until his fingers burn. Soon, he realizes that he needs to talk to someone, that if he doesn’t talk about this he will go crazy.

All he needs now is advice.

Takes the cell phone from the pocket that’s inside of his coat. He sends a message to the only person that he can trust to in a situation like this.

~~~

 _Mama_ , I need to talk with you. Can I come by and see you as soon as I return?

~~~

The answer arrives without he gets to turn off the screen:

~~~

Of course, sweetie. Enter without knocking; I'll be trying on clothes. My old London trunk came to me, it's full of old things you'll probably remember!

~~~

He smiles when reading her. How much he loves her and how much he owes her, how much she helped him when the _curse_ fell on him.

If it weren’t for her…

Going to the _network_ at human speed would take time considering where he is, especially if he doesn’t have the car; using the speed that been a _shadow_ confers, it only takes ten minutes to him. Then, he stops at the National Art Museum of Ukraine and smiles with his hands in his pockets. The snow scarcely stains the shoulders of his coat and his hair.

He walks in greeting with a more polite than honest smile to the human guards who take care of the museum and, consequently, of one of the twenty-five headquarters that the _network_ has, eighteen of which are in Europe, while the other seven are located spread across the other four continents, three in America, two in Asia, one in Africa, one in Oceania.

Dark Silence, the most important _shadow network_ in the world. Not the only one, but the most influential one.

The one that imparts justice in pursuit of the survival of the _shadows_ in the confused, swift, cruel but advanced human society.

When entering the museum, he crosses it in total darkness; it has been hours since visitors and tourists have left, so there’s no one around and there’s no need to use other entries, the most hidden ones that surrounds the building.

He reaches an ancient painting of the twelfth century, runs the iron gate hidden behind and enters.

After going down three floors through a spiral staircase, which he goes down without any light, moving in the shadows as if he were part of them, reaches another immense iron door that doesn’t mean any effort to run, as well as the previous one. He closes it and smiles.

Now is Mélovin who’s at home.

The construction of that museum was made just over a century ago. As in almost all Dark Silence’s headquarters, a pact between the _shadows_ and the humans during the construction allowed the little great secret world that the _shadows_ require to live on the backs of all humanity, where they cannot be discovered, where they can live how they want, where they can wait for the moment in which their presence in the human world is required. Where they can also meet with the highest representors of local government in order to sign new collaborative treaties to ensure the perpetuation of peace between the two races.

Not all the _shadows_ of Kiev live there; in fact, very few do, because the function of the headquarters is that, being a headquarter, not a home, but it’s the meeting place par excellence, the place where all the _shadows_ of the world are welcome.

The place that every _shadow_ can always call _home_.

As is common in each headquarter and that human establishment that serves as a facade without humanity suspecting it, the architecture maintains the characteristic style of the outside. Here, the neoclassical is notorious in every corner, the exception of the iron doors that he has crossed, so heavy that no human will never be able to run them.

He observes the columns that demarcate a wide gallery that borders a majestic hall illuminated with lamps that simulate candles. The gallery, littered with libraries filled with a spooky number of books, is illuminated by chandeliers; despite how much light there is, the atmosphere doesn’t stop being dark.

Kostyantyn goes through the gallery looking at the hall through the columns; he sees Artem reunited with acquaintances of the _network_ , chatting about who knows what in the centre, where sumptuous seats lined with red silk that form a comfortable circle are used for meetings. Next to Artem, there’re about ten _shadows_ ; he recognizes three but only remembers the name of one, Luka.

He hasn’t spent much time in this headquarters, not enough to meet all the Ukrainian _shadows_ , since he has spent the last thirty-two years traveling with Mother as part of her, one might say, vampiric entourage, serving as his second assistant; the first, the most important for ninety-eight years, is Artem, the same Artem who knows so many _shadows_ thanks to having so much time with the founder, leader and mother of Dark Silence.

At the end of the gallery, he lowers a floor on stairs and arrives at a crossroad from which two broad corridors extend and turns towards the one on the left. He walks through the corridor that lies completely in darkness listening, in some corner that he doesn’t see, the unmistakable moans of some group act, which seem to come from his right. Sometimes it bothers him to hear similar things, more now, after sharing such a sweet moment with Nikita, for which he decides to ignore the calls that invite him to join. To ignore them, he sings in whispers one of the many songs of that one that’s behind the gigantic wooden door that’s at the end of the long corridor:

“ _I won't cry for you. I won't crucify the things you do_ …”

He reaches the door, opens it, closes it and stops to sing: Queen sounds through the vinyl on his right side.

Looks at the space that serves as a luxurious room for Mother: there’s so much extravagance in this room that it’s hard to define it. There’re works of art on the walls, there’re vinyl’s scattered on the floor, there’re guitars, basses, a drum, but there’s also a beautiful dressing table, a coffin painted in metallic silver, dresses hanging from hangers nailed to the columns. Towards the end, there’s a wide threshold after which a door to the front, one to the left and one to the right lies.

When he listens to her singing "Radio Ga Ga", Kostyantyn knows that Mother is close.

When the most beautiful being in the universe runs towards him, he proves it.

"Citrus!" he exclaims as he took Mother's best friend in his arms, a lovely tabby grey cat with a hypnotic look, the spoiled one of her entourage. The cat, always so sweet to him, caresses himself against his chest when he carries him like a baby. Until he starts smelling his mouth by resting his hairy front paws on his chest.

"I know, I know… I smell like human, right?"

Citrus stares at him, and that look is like watching him nod.

"Take me with _mama_ , Citrus," he asks as he places him on the ground, not before allowing himself to caress his back.

Citrus runs to the back door. Kostyantyn follows him, and between golden lights, in that room whose walls are lined with red wallpaper that has black roses drawn, behind a folding screen he sees her silhouette.

" _Mama_ , I'm here."

She, who seemed to struggle with something behind the folding screen, pokes a hand with eternal nails painted in red. The white of her skin is like snow, or not; maybe it's even whiter given her vampire age.

"Hello, sweetie!" she greets him, always warm, always motherly, in her perfect American English. "Could you turn down the music? I'm stuck and I cannot concentrate."

Kostyantyn laughs quietly. Using his powers, he doesn’t need to move from that point to turn off the equipment that sounds in the main room; he just does it.

If Nikita knows about the amount of skills that he has and of which he hasn’t even hinted a little…

A moment, and Mother emerges from behind the folding screen in a pink bubble dress. Her hair, platinum blond, is styled like Marilyn Monroe; her eyes have the makeup run in blue and black tones; her arms are full of tattoos that look fantastic on her porcelain skin, the whitest that Kostyantyn has ever seen in a _shadow_.

Because yes, it’s whiter than the snow that, in the human world, begins to cover the city.

"Very 2008, right?" Mother asks, staring at him.

She’s the most perfect, wonderful and admirable woman he has ever known and will ever meet. Is the best.

His everything, the woman who saved him.

How don’t get emotional before her? How don’t pounce on her, hug her and cry blood on her shoulder?

"Very from that time we spent in Los Angeles," Kostyantyn responds with the emotions to the surface.

"That’s true! Give me a moment, I'll get a little more comfortable." Mother hides behind the folding screen once more. "What happened, sweetie? Did you know something about…?"

 _That_ matter. Kostyantyn squeezes his eyelids to recriminate himself: he came back for _him_ , because he has unfinished business with _him_ , the main one taking him to the stake to kill _him_. But he hasn’t focused enough on it.

But Nikita…

He massages his forehead: how irresponsible he’s being. It would be better if Mother punished him as soon as possible.

Considering all he has to say, she will undoubtedly do it.

Citrus caresses himself with the folding screen; Mother comes out again, this time wearing a torn and worn shirt from Iron Maiden’s _Killers_ and shorts. She takes Citrus in her arms, approaches Kostyantyn and, making him stoop a little after reaching him by taking his shoulder, kisses him at the right corner of his mouth.

"You smell like angels, my love."

Kostyantyn wants to cry: she understands everything, absolutely everything.

“Yes, _mama_."

"Do you want to tell me what's going on?" she asks him, serious.

She has noticed, yes. Everything.

Kostyantyn sighs and surprises Mother and himself. It will be better to tell her as soon as possible.

 

**...**

 

The radio is very low; it reaches him from the inside of his apartment while he, leaning over his little balcony with a blanket over his head, observes the falling snow with a gesture that can be defined as absent, but it’s illusion.

He’s happy.

An Irina Bilyk’s song comes to him from the radio; how cool is "A ya plyvu". He listens to the beginning thinking about Kostyantyn; he needs to get carried away, try not to think, and help himself, with Kostyantyn as support, in order to recover the ability to value his own feelings.

He has to let himself be carried away by what he feels in search of finding his own shore. He has already been shipwrecked too much.

It's time to go afloat.

With his voice, with his feelings, with Kostyantyn by his side…

With Kostyantyn, without further absurd prejudices.

" _Zmyye vse voda, bulo and tak bude_ …" he sings in a whisper. " _A ty plyveš u čovni, I tak spokiyno meni_ …"

And a chill run through him.

Nikita narrows his eyes: that chill seems familiar. Remembers, and finds the same feeling a few hours ago with Kostyantyn, as they walked towards his building.

What…?

Looks to the right, to the left, down and up; nothing. Looks as far as he can, looks for some anomaly, but he finds nothing than Kiev, the snow and the need that beats in his chest to the rhythm of the longing for freedom.

Feeling already too cold and sure that the chill to nothing more than that early winter is due, Nikita enters the apartment, closes the window that leads to the balcony and locks it, never noticing that, very close to him, in the terrace of his own building, a beautiful long figure, young and brightly dressed with the most pristine white, looks at him from afar.

"History repeats itself," _he_ tells himself, looking at the snow with the same illusion expressed by Nikita just a few minutes ago. "Why, Kostya…?"

Why does he look at someone else through the fog, if _they_ …?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! Thank you for reading. :♥
> 
> First of all, I'm sorry for the two weeks delay: the previous chapter left me emotionally exhausted and I needed a little break, in which I allowed myself to write a story to practice narrative (?). I'm so sorry, but I needed the break. T_T Luckily, after the complicated dates came a lot of light, so my mood has improved a lot. 
> 
> Thank you for supporting me in the meantime. :')
> 
> About this chapter: if it wasn't clear, Mother is basically Lady Gaga (!!!), or someone who's too similar to her. I decided to use her because I love my mother monster, because it's not the first time that I base a character on her and because I was excited to write her as a some kind of vampire mentor to Mél: I couldn't use anyone else. I will deepen in their bond later; today, I wanted to reveal some little things about Dark Silence, nothing else, give a general (very general) screenshot before the whole thing. At some point, in about three or four chapters, we will know much of the truth. 
> 
> Or something like that (?). 
> 
> In my mind, she and he shine together. I love to think about them, because as a fan of her, I think I understand Mél's illusions and feelings. That's why I put her here, because I wanted to imagine them together. :') 
> 
> I know it's silly, sorry. XD
> 
> About the mysterious villain (?), I already gave many clues (yep), but I don't want to say it yet because I'm ashamed (?).
> 
> I promise that I will give depth to the character, isn't that he will be a jealous evil creature and "the end"; I have many ideas for what follows, and I would like to make a very interesting character. I hope I can. 
> 
> About Citrus: I think that I'm more fan of that precious kitty than of Niki and Kostya. XD So, I need Citrus here and here is! XD Sorry again. 
> 
> I start to calculate that this story's going to have about twenty chapters, so we're already close to half. I hadn't planned it to be so extensive, but as always happens to me, I get passionate.
> 
> Anyway… T_T
> 
> Many thanks to those who follow this story. :') 
> 
> Until the next week. I hope to update on Tuesday or Wednesday. And sincerely! I'm not going to lie anymore, I swear. XD
> 
> Thousands of kisses and THANKS FOREVA. ♥♥♥
> 
> *screams like Niki in A ya plyvu* IRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH


	10. IX

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kostyantyn finds out that he was right about that person of his past, but in the worst way possible. Nikita, on the other hand, cannot sleep, not enough, less when something happen in his dreams...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As usual, please forgive my English. I worked very hard in this chapter. 
> 
> Thank you forever for your support. :')

_He_ closes his eyes just to remember what hasn’t happened for thirty-two years, the image of two bodies stretched out, one over another, and two open mouths asking for more.

Because loving is not enough. Not when the feeling is more real than the reality itself.

"Die with me," he whispered in his memory, without more air, without more body, without more than the sensation of loving him as _he_ did.

As _he_ does.

As _he_ will.

"Die…?"

"Die, Kostya… Die to be free…"

 _And be free to be together_ , he adds now, in his mind, before the altar that’s as white as his clothes and his skin, before the eternal white hair that he sees lying on it, below the white fabric in the white space that stains with light his dark present, dark not for being a _shadow_.

Dark for what they have taken from him.

"Dark Silence has to disappear," _she_ says to _him_ and to so many others, to those who watch over her dreams of freedom.

"Dark Silence has to disappear," _he_ repeats with his brothers, all kneeling before the altar.

"Because Dark Silence lies, because it has distorted our mission."

"Our mission," they all repeat.

"Because Dark Silence cannot prevail!"

"Never!"

"Because we have the power source on our side! Because we have the divine blessing! Because we exist with a purpose being what we are, the _shadows_ of humanity."

"The _shadows_!"

"Because we will not allow them to use our gift in vain… We will never allow it again!"

"Never!" everyone shouts.

"Never…" _he_ whispers.

But the bodies lying together, but the love…

"Never…?"

The white goddess’s black eyes turn towards him, and enter him as they look at _him_ , and appropriates _him_ in doing so.

… Kostya is part of Dark Silence. _He **knows**_ what _he_ should do.

Because is _she_ who looks at **him** from the altar and _she_ is the one that _he_ must obey.

"But, _My Goddess_ …"

"Is me who you must obey…" the eyes say.

And the bodies disappear.

And the thirst for revenge returns.

…

But Kostya is part of Dark Silence…

.

.

.

 

**IX**

 

He speaks, speaks and speaks, he does it for an hour and a half without stopping for a single second, petting Citrus, who never moved from his lap, and fixing his eyes on him to never look at Mother, who gave him caresses on his right arm as he explained everything: the excitement of returning to Ukraine, how he chose Nikita, his voice at the bar, his feelings, his essence and how he has revived something that Kostyantyn has believed dead for decades.

Everything that _he_ had taken from him.

As he talks, he thinks about things along the way, things that he hasn’t thought about enough, especially those related to everything that Nikita means to him in relation to everything he had felt for someone else, the guilty, thirty-two years ago.

Soon, he understands that the situation is the same: he has found someone in the fog in an absurdly similar way, in a moment of grey and cold existence, but this time he feels it different.

Not even _he_ , whom he had loved so much before the betrayal, had made him feel all this. Neither with the attitudes, nor with the words, much less with the voice.

What he feels for Nikita, he concludes, is the most powerful thing he has ever felt. It’s comparable to what he feels for Mother, which is saying too much, but it’s different, yes; it’s a feeling of another nature.

Because she’s the woman who adopted him at the time he lost everything in hands of the _curse_. She’s his _shadow-mother_ , his family together with Artem.

Because Nikita is the one whom Kostyantyn has already idealized as a companion, as the person he wants at his side in the most literal eternity.

" _Mama_ , I know that I hurried, that I got blinded, that I shouldn’t have feel this way, much less fall in love like this, but he…"

He stops for the first time to cover his mouth for extreme emotions. The Roman numeral clock that Mother has above the coffin located in her rehearsal room, hanging from the wall between Cubist paintings that look ghostly because of the weakness of the light, marks three in the morning with five minutes. Feels more than he thought, Kostyantyn discovers: he feels in a too immature way, but real.

"You're human, sweetie," Mother says next to him, in a sweet whisper pronounced in English, "It would be impossible to judge you, what happened to you has happened to all of us here, but, well, you're fucked up!"

Kostyantyn feels the last assertion as a stab between the eyes. Tears peek out, but Mother laughs.

He laughs too when he understands that it’s true, that he’s fucked up.

There’s no more diplomatic way to define it.

"I know…" he laughs. "But I'd like to think that I can do something about it. I'm wrong, right?"

Mother gets up from the bench in which they’re sitting, the one she uses to play her piano, that it has a delicate transparent structure and with edges covered with neon lights. Citrus jumps from Kostyantyn's lap to the top of the piano while Mother walks around it looking at the floor.

Kostyantyn looks at her not without shyness: maybe, she has laughed to soften reality.

He's fucked up not in a sympathetic way, but in a textual way.

He strokes the keys of the piano as if only these could console the anguish that grabs him.

"Unlike other communities," Mother says, petting Citrus, who has he followed her throughout the entire road around the piano, "in Dark Silence we have never allowed ourselves to renounce the human side of our being, because we were human before and because we believe that this _gift_ is to help humanity, not to face it or slaughter it .We remain in the shadows, yes, because in them we are more powerful, but always waiting for the time to go out there, to help humans using our _gift_ , that’s our belief, to help to make the human’s world to which we belonged a more just one."

"Yes," Kostyantyn just says.

"As you already know, there’re other communities, like that of Japan, that very serious order where what they do is to control that no more _shadows_ are generated, without ever intervening in humans lives, and to live a life of peace, meditation and reading, because they consider that eternity has as its mission the intellectual realization; or that small family very south of Chile and Argentina, who live deep in the mountains and enjoy a life of eccentric luxuries, feeding on animals and disoriented travellers. There’s also that of South Africa, which kills anyone who doesn’t respect the clear rules of their secret society and eliminates any _shadow_ that chooses to follow another path, because they consider that their actions protect humanity from a kind of curse. I’m not agree with these methodologies, but I can’t oppose them, because I can’t expect everyone to think like me."

Terrified for not knowing where Mother is going with everything she's saying, Kostyantyn nods.

Mother follows, but with Citrus in her arms:

"Then we are, the ones most linked to humanity. Do you know why I decided to leave that small Italian society at the beginning of the 19th century, in which I spent so many decades?"

"Because you didn’t agree with killing innocents."

"Yes, but also for another reason: I never resigned myself to stop being human." She drops Citrus, he walks through the top of the piano again and Mother returns to her place, next to Kostyantyn and in front of the keys. "When _he_ gave you the _gift_ , things weren’t as it should be; _he_ wasn’t with the right people."

"I know…"

"But we were able to save you, bring you here and give you another kind of eternity, one in which you wouldn’t allow yourself to renounce to that high humanity that you have." Mother takes him by the shoulder and drags him toward her. Kostyantyn closes his eyes on her breast.

It's like being a child, being him for a while, being him in her arms, those snow-white arms that have always been able to protect him from everything.

But he knows that she cannot save him this time.

"I will not lie to you: this is wrong, you can’t love a human, you can’t relate so much to a human, you can’t have the kind of intimacy that love so deserves with a human… But shadows can’t create _animal-shadows_ either, and here you see him with us, and here he is with me as the last two hundred and fifty-eight years…"

Kostyantyn looks at Citrus, a name he gave him when he came to Dark Silence, since Mother used to change his name every certain amount of time to protect him, or so she explained. If he remembers well, she met him one cold night in Florence: he was hurt, weak and wouldn’t survive.

"For most of the _shadows_ that exist in the world, Citrus is a mistake and your love for Nikita too, but I refuse to think it that way. I prefer to think that we can accept that, although most disagree, there’re good intentions behind things that only look like something bad. So, I'll just give you some advice, okay? You know I'm not as strict as _papa_."

Still on Mother's chest and holding her by the waist, Kostyantyn laughs: Mother always harasses Artem by telling him that he’s the father of her son, him.

And how fortunate he is to have them both despite everything, despite of…

"Please, _mama_."

She releases him and takes him from his hands gently.

"Consider offering our _gift_ to him."

Kostyantyn closes his eyes.

He lets go of her and turns to the opposite side. However, she doesn’t resign herself: she hugs him from behind and fills his back with kisses.

"I know you have convictions about this, sweetie. But there’s no other way, not if you feel what you say you feel and if you’re prepared to be a companion for him. Maybe now you tolerate it, maybe you can handle the situation, but there’ll come a point where, if you continue seeing each other, your love will be too much and you will need to tell him what you feel in other ways. And I don’t necessarily talk about sex! I speak about kisses, caresses, hugs, the pleasure of sleeping in the arms of the one you love. I know because I know you, because I know how much you can feel…"

"I admit that I've already thought about it and…"

"Have you thought about it?"

"Yes… And you know I'm against that! But after what happened tonight, after everything he told me…"

"Do you want him to fulfil his dreams without renouncing to his humanity?"

"That I would like…"

"You’re making decisions for him."

The same thing that Artem said when they spoke inside the coffin. Although he doesn’t understand Mother's point, so he asks about:

"Telling him to become what I am wouldn’t be that, precisely?"

"No.”

"No?"

"Kostyantyn, look at me."

Reluctantly more for shyness than discomfort or annoyance, Kostyantyn obeys: Mother gives him the eyes and the smile that more difficult are to ignore, because they annihilate his conceptual heart. Full of life, with more life than any human or _shadow_ , she looks at him with nothing but love in the pupils.

She’s so special. She’s so but so…

"I'm not telling you to force him just as you were; I'm telling you to offer it to him. It will be Nikita's decision, you understand? And if you offer it to him soon you’ll hurt him less, because if both of you aren’t the same you’ll not be able to advance in the way that, for what you told me about the bookstore, both’ll want to do it. It's about you can’t be human again, honey. But he can become a _shadow_.”

Kostyantyn takes a deep breath. The subject is of extreme sensitivity for him. But neither by Mother can he avoid objection:

"But he deserves a lot of people to listen to him, mama… I can’t ask him to give up so many people for me."

"Then you lied to him."

"You say I lied to him?"

"You told him that the number doesn’t matter." Mother puts her mouth to his right ear. "And let me tell you a secret: you told him the truth."

Kostyantyn realizes his contradiction; ashamed, he sighs looking at his knees. It's true, he told him what he believes, but…

"Humans deserve to hear him. They deserve it more than me."

"But maybe he wants someone like you to listen to him, not just anyone."

Kostyantyn looks at Mother, who in turn looks at him as before, with the same warmth that so much love expresses.

"But I don’t know if that…"

Mother pats his chest.

"Let him decide how he wants to be happy. And one more thing: it doesn’t have to be something urgent; give yourselves your time, spend time together, get to know each other, talk, enjoy each other. If it works, if you manage to be good companions and he wants to continue, then there’ll not be much left to say, right? Besides, you told me that he doesn’t have anyone; if you turn him into a _shadow_ , he will not only have you; he will have all of us."

To turn Nikita into a _shadow_ , him?

The idea alone bothers him, but seduces him, but terrifies him by activating memories too painful to be reviewed in detail. He doesn’t know how to do that, he doesn’t understand it; it’s a very complicated process, not so much for what it means to understand when to give the blood to the human, because that can be learned and he’s _very_ good in what involves learning itself, but the fact that the process fails at the minimum error terrifies him.

What if he loses Nikita…?

"I…" he whispers.

Someone knocks.

Kostyantyn takes a deep breath as Mother goes to the front door.

High heels resonate: next to Mother, hand in hand with her, an imposing golden-skinned woman enters the room, she does it with a huge attitude, using a black leather dress and boots of the same material, with curly black hair behind her back, corpulent, of exuberant forms, and that look of eternal thirty-five years.

Jandiara, a Brazilian _shadow_ , part of Mother's vampiric entourage for about seventy years.

"My dear, what brings you here?" Mother says in Portuguese when, in the middle of the room, she hugs her and kisses her.

Jandiara gives Kostyantyn a cold look. She always makes fun of him for everything, he calls him "spoiled child" in Portuguese, but despite the fact that sometimes they seem not to getting along, he knows that she, like the rest, appreciates him.

And yes: he knows that he’s Mother's spoiled and that this point sometimes generates conflicts in the entourage. Although he has never wanted to think about why Mother seems to prefer him. He cannot, more considering that he has never been able to be fonder of anyone than Mother or Artem. Not because the rest have something bad, not because of anything in particular; only by himself, who has always had difficulties in relating to others.

"Hanna needs to talk to you as soon as possible," Jandiara says in her low, seductive voice, but with an implacable attitude.

Mother turns to Kostyantyn, whispers "I'll be back" and closes the front door when she leaves with Jandiara.

Kostyantyn looks at Citrus: he’s on the piano, staring at him while he’s grooming a front paw. Smiling, Kostyantyn pricks his left thumb with the right’s nail and offers it to him.

"I invite you a little bit of me," he says.

Citrus licks him. How tender he is and how many tickles he gives him with his rough tongue.

Thinks of what Mother has said as he watches him silently: it's true, maybe loving a human being is as bad as having turned an animal into a _shadow_ , something sharply forbidden and seen as an aberration by all the _shadows_ of the world, but that something is wrong for many doesn’t mean that it really is.

In this, the number doesn’t matter either.

What he feels for Nikita can no longer be denied: he adores him. He adores him and wants to help him, wants him to live, wants him to be free and happy, that he can achieve everything that he sets out to do and in the way that he wants it to be. All he wants for him is seeing him happy and keep going, with no vestiges of surrender in those eyes that always deserve to shine.

That he doesn’t be shy and…

He strokes the keys of the piano one more time; he feels his fingers tremble when a melody shoots inside his mind to the deepest part of his conceptual heart.

Tries to think about how to transfer the melody that he hums to the piano, when the door opens abruptly and high heels resonate again, in a hurry.

"Spoiled child," Jandiara says from the doorway, serious, more serious than she was until just now. "We need you, and it's _urgent_ , so follow me."

Kostyantyn stands up not knowing what to say. After looking at the keys of the piano and making it sound the right way inside his mind, he nods, or rather lets Mélovin do it.

"Okay," he says, and the door closes behind them both when they leave.

 

**…**

 

Three thirty in the morning, and it's as if the concept of ‘sleep’ had lost its meaning, because he tries and tries in the middle of his dark apartment, but no, nothing.

Because the darkness only to him reminds.

To him, so warm despite the coldness of his skin, capable of so much, of so much magic. To him, kissing him again and again on the lips, promising that loneliness will never return, not while they be with each other.

Because he will hear him and vice versa. Because they will be heard together.

He smiles like a little boy. Is he going too fast? Shouldn’t be more cautious? Besides, Kostyantyn had gone like this, so suddenly…

"For being a vampire…"

When nervousness catches him in his arms, Nikita is soon filled with doubts.

He has certain prejudices, and the main one comes from that different nature that he doesn’t know him. Everything is wonderful when they talk about music and what they feel and when they express everything they contain when kissing, everything is light and heat despite the cold that surrounds them, but it’s still incredible that beings like him exist.

In some way, it’s not hard to accept it, because the proves were conclusive. The problem is to think in detail.

It’s as if he forgot that he’s a vampire when kissing him, as if he were only capable of thinking it when reflecting on it in detail.

He’s so human. His feelings are. How to believe that there’s something wrong with being a vampire, if…?

"We are the same, even if we aren’t."

He laughs when remembering an old song.

" _For just one night we could be the same, no matter what they say_ …" he sings in whispers as he covers himself up to his neck, when he turns around in bed and rediscovers, over it, the concept hidden behind the word that no longer means anything, ‘sleep’.

Sighs, contains tears that try to spill to release the quantity and quality of emotions that surpass him physically and mentally.

He’s a vampire, he’s mysterious, there’re many things that Kostyantyn cannot tell to him.

But Nikita wants him. He wants to share more with him.

He wants to forget the details and get lost in the feeling, nothing else.

 

**…**

 

They enter in the room of an old house on Kiev’s outskirts, one where around ten _shadows_ associated with Dark Silence have spent the last hundred years, or more, or less, together, living in a group relationship, emotional as well as physical. As Artem explained during the trip, they are peaceful and friendly _shadows_ , always at the service of the _network_.

Or they were.

When Jandiara lights a lantern, because the electrical system seems not to react to the powers of any, all, except Mother, back one step.

Nothing prevails but remains of clothing and bodies, blood in every corner, even in the ceiling, and ashes, an absurd amount of ashes that only mean one thing for _shadows_.

Definitive death.

"They were beheaded," Mother says, serious, but not even with all the seriousness of the tone manages to disguise the pain.

"How do you know, mom?" Alva asks.

Kostyantyn looks at her: she’s the youngest of the group, both for her teenage appearance and vampiric age, always hugging Jandiara, her partner for twenty-one years. Originally from Sweden, she’s so blond and so white and her eyes are so heavenly that he’s blinded by her gaze. She looks fragile, but her personality doesn’t denote any kind of fragility; she’s always calm, and she’s kind, and her sweet tone never seems to be disturbed. Not even now, before so many dead brothers, it does it.

"Simple, pretty," Mother explains in English, her eyes always given to the remains, which she observes with an indecipherable gesture, or so Kostyantyn feels staying to her right. "There’re three ways to kill us: burning us with fire or sunlight, which turns us into ashes and leaves nothing of us, or dismembering us, because that doesn’t allow us to regenerate ourselves. This last option is the only one that makes the bodies not disintegrate completely; that's why we can see part of their remains.”

There’s silence; Kostyantyn knows that Jandiara trembles, because the light of the lantern she holds does it. Looks to Mother’s left, where Alva, so pretty in a blue dress covered by a grey wool coat, is embracing Jandiara, and notices how with caresses on the back it seems to try to comfort Jandiara. Artem, as always, is right next to Mother.

Without further ado, Kostyantyn observes the remains. He cannot avoid saying what he says, however much it may be, at this point, an obviousness:

"Our bones and our skins are more resistant than those of a human, nothing cuts us off. How could they cut them with such brutality?"

"With a special weapon, surely," Artem deduces, dismayed at the image. "In Sadame, the Japanese sect, they have a kind of katana forged in a very specific way, for example. But it’s not easy to get the material and nobody knows of another weapon capable of something like that. Also, they have never revealed it to anyone; it's part of the secret that they reveal only to those who join them."

"This is very serious," Jandiara says, and when she speaks her voice is rushed by the deep frustration that overwhelms her; the light trembles so much that Kostyantyn swears that the lantern will fall at any moment. "This is not normal…"

"They loved each other…" Alva whispers with her usual tone, so soft and warm, but brutal because of the sadness that she describes. "It's not fair…"

Sad, Kostyantyn sees how they embrace.

Hanna, the highest authority of Dark Silence in Ukraine, has sent them there to look for clues, since the _shadows_ that lived there had been committed, just yesterday, to feed properly on a despicable band of abusers that the police have already located in the area near where’s the house in which they are now, contemplating the remains. The group of _shadows_ never arrived at the meeting or answered any message. None of those presents thought it possible to find this perverse scenario.

Less can believe what happens suddenly.

A sharp, very sharp sound rises from the bottom of the pile of ashes, blood and remains. Artem and Jandiara threaten to approach, but Mother stops them with a move of her hand. Alone, she advances towards the pile and removes everything with her hands while the light trembles horribly.

She moves, remains, clothes, more and more ashes, and finds him.

"Mother…" Borysko whispers, one of the members of the group, _shadow_ of not more than thirty years when turned, with light brown hair and grey eyes.

He’s completely stained by the blood and ashes of those whom he loved, without a leg, without any arm, but with the vital parts intact. Anguish flashes in his face.

He will not survive.

"Tell me what happened," Mother asks as she embraces him with all her strength against her chest.

Borysko cries, laughs, shakes himself against Mother. He’s emaciated, his veins it shows too much under his skin, which comes off, and his eyes are sunken in his skull. Difficultly, with his voice undone by the pain rather than his state, he speaks as he can:

"It was yesterday. He was one, he had some very strange daggers in his hands, or something like that, I couldn’t see well… I… I was the first one he knocked down, because I trusted myself that he couldn’t hurt me. After cutting my arms, he did the same with my leg. Afterwards, I could only hear how he killed my…"

Cries against Mother’s breast, who cries with him as Jandiara does when bursting into sobs, just as Artem and Alva do it silently, just as Kostyantyn tries not to, although he feels the red tears trickle down his cheeks.

"I'm very sorry…" Mother says, and saying it is in vain.

Borysko continues making an overexertion:

"Out of despair, I suppose, I managed to get out far enough below them, I could despite of how much blood I had already lost: he, turning his back on us, seemed to sob. He was dressed in white, but his suit was almost completely dyed red after attacking us."

Kostyantyn feels a chill. Alva, Jandiara and Artem, especially Artem, look at him at the same time.

Mother interrupts the gazes:

"What was he like?" she asks.

"He was tall, thin, very white, and his face looked very sweet…"

Kostyantyn covers his mouth when a gasp of pain escapes from him. Borysko continues with the description, and everything is obvious.

"You were right, Mélovin," Alva whispers as she caresses his back after reaching him. "They’re here, in Ukraine."

 _He’s_ here, _him_.

"And he said something ...?" Mother asks, as stunned as everyone in the room is.

"He said… 'Dark Silence must disappear'," Borysko whispers, shattered. "He said that and looked at me, Mother… H-He looked at me!"

 _Which means that he knew what he was doing, that he left him alive on purpose_ , Kostyantyn deduces, his face tinged red with tears.

"That’s it, _he_ warned us…" Mother whispers.

"I only ask you to burn me in exchange for being the messenger. I beg you… I've told you everything I know, now just… Just burn me!"

"Borysko…"

"BURN ME!"

The scream goes through the whole room, the whole house, the whole Kiev. It goes through Kostyantyn’s conceptual heart, above all.

He has been gathering little evidences in different parts of the world for two years; everything he gathered led him to think that Kiev was the place where _it would pass_. Only Mother believed him completely, and since they arrived, every morning, after following Nikita to his building, he has dedicated himself to trying to find more evidence.

And nothing.

And now, when he has neglected his investigation for falling in love with Nikita so much, this happens.

It's not fair.

It’s not fair that _he_ has returned precisely now.

Because he has no doubts: it’s _him_.

And _he_ hasn’t changed.

And _he_ ’s still the one who, Kostyantyn thinks without all the necessary information, always was.

The demon with the face of an angel.

The one who has ruined everything forever.

 

**…**

 

.

.

.

Ethereal voices paint the world white, as if the purest snow fell from each one; he feels how red tears fall down his eyes, meanwhile.

On the top of an altar made of glass, he swears to see a woman as ethereal as the voices that sing so delicate melody around her. And her white hair shines, and her white eyes shine, and her white clothes shine, and her nails, and her teeth, and her lips; everything shines.

Her skin, as white as snow, shines.

She advances; fleet, she’s carried by the ethereal voices that intone the celestial choir.

She takes his face, and she's cold.

" _Schö_ …"

What?

" _gel_ …"

And from her white eyes emerges a dense dark force that seizes them.

And she looks at him with them.

And he feels how she covers him, and catches him, and hangs him, and annihilates him. And he tries to scream and to escape, but no, there's nothing.

In the darkness of those eyes, in the density that covers him, there’s absolutely nothing.

 

…

 

He wakes up, and open his eyes as fast as possible. Urged, turns on the lamp on his night table.

What was that nightmare?

Nikita lets himself fall on the bed; disturbed, he cannot stop his heart, which beats with such vehemence.

He has nightmares very often, it happens to him since he was little, but he didn’t have one since that one of the moons crying blood on him.

He knows that the crying moons remind him to Kostyantyn, because they were two clear moons, as clear as his blue vampire eyes.

But this…?

Unable to relax and to continue sleeping, he thinks about reading something. He searches for _Carmilla_ on the table. Automatically, looks for a specific chapter, the one in which Laura describes her.

" _Her eyes large, dark, and lustrous; her hair was quite wonderful, I never saw hair so magnificently thick and long when it was down about her shoulders_ ," he reads in whispers.

That was what he had seen in the dream. Although the light was so white it seemed to cover everything.

Until the darkness that had taken hold of his eyes manifested, that's how it had been.

He says to himself that it must have been a diurnal remnant, an image of Carmilla that remained in his mind and appeared to him in a dream because he had fallen asleep thinking and rethinking Kostyantyn's vampiric nature. He says too that there’s no point in giving it importance, since he knows that he has always had strange nightmares.

But a chill run through him.

But it’s one that has already felt.

But there’s no one around.

Or it is…?

He gets out of bed and goes to the window that looks onto the street from his eighth floor. He puts his hands on the glass and feels his fingers freeze; outside, the snow is as white as the ethereal altar of his dream.

And no, there’s no one around.

So, _what_ ’s he feeling…?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading. I don't know how to thank you anymore. :')
> 
> Today I want to say many things because the fic is reaching its real conflict, the point where things begin to be understood and also emerge new mysteries. Sorry if I talked a lot:
> 
> About Citrus Vampire (?!!!): this sounds like fangirl caprice and I know it, but I swear to you that I have a powerful reason to do it, a reason that will be better to keep in mind for the future, because he will be very important in the plot.
> 
> About Jandiara and Alva, they are my characters, here it's not necessary to guess (?). I liked the idea of putting characters from different parts of the world because, after all, that's the way things are in this universe. Then we'll know more about Dark Silence; a lot remains to be discovered.
> 
> About Hanna, she is also mine, although I considered Jamala and I admit it (!!!). XD But I imagined her very different physically and I found it interesting to make her original. She will have some importance in the future too. 
> 
> About * him *, congratulations (?) To those who guessed who he is. XD Keep me secret in the meantime, please (?). I'm excited to see you excited with this, thank you very much. ♥
> 
> On many things that still don't find explanation, there are two that I want to highlight: the power of the vampires over the electric light and the chills and dreams that Niki has. These two phenomena in particular have a very specific explanation, so I hope you like it. 
> 
> In the next chapter we will know more about it. 
> 
> And one last thing: sorry for my Eurovision references but AAAAAHHHH (?) Is that last week I was writing my Top 5 of Belarus to put it on Tumblr, just for fun, and I went into a loop of songs that I love, from that and other countries, until "We could be the same" from maNga appeared (Turkey 2010), which is one of my favourites of all time, and I realized that the lyrics are SO them here. T___T
> 
> I highly recommend listening to it. <3 (especially the live version)
> 
> I cannot believe I got to Chapter IX. It's all thanks to you. ♥
> 
> Blake, Di, Jadoremelekseev, Kostya Anon, and Memiiiii (I still can't believe it), thanks for this, for give it a chance to my story.
> 
> I hope to upload in some point of next week.
> 
> Thank you so much for everything, to all who read, to all the eyes on the other side of the screen. I hope you like what's coming. <3
> 
> THANKSSSSS :')


	11. X

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nikita and Kostyantyn are full of doubts. The delicate situation it requires that they analyze how prudent it's to continue seeing each other even when there're more difficulties than certainties in their relationship.
> 
> The problem is that the biggest certainty, what they already feel for each other, isn't so easy to evade.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Forgive my mistakes, please. And I hope you enjoy.
> 
> And I'M SO SORRY, but this chapter it's... long. :'(
> 
> Thank you so much for give a chance to my story. ♥

_He_ scrubs his skin under hot water, scrubs it nonstop, until _he_ sees, under his feet, how the reddened liquid accumulates.

 _He_ cannot do it. He cannot.

Since _he_ saw him, the whole truth in which _he_ has believed the last thirty-two years has been blurred; since he saw Kostyantyn walking the streets of Kiev, being anybody when even in his human years he wasn’t, it has shaken all his reality.

When _he_ finishes cleaning himself, and comes out of the shower, and wears his usual white clothes, watches Kiev through the window of the hotel.

But Kostyantyn didn’t walk alone.

 _He_ cannot blame him: he was deceived. When they ripped him from his arms that fateful night of April, when they snatched him from _him_ despite how much he shouted to open his eyes, how much _he_ tried to make him come to his senses, it was by dint of deception.

That's why, for that and for everything, Dark Silence must disappear.

 _He_ contains the tears and clenches the fists; yes, it must disappear.

They must pay for having condemned _him_ to this unbearable loneliness. For stealing Kostyantyn forever.

For having ruined everything that mattered and will matter. Him. He at his side, ready to dispel the fog of his heart.

The cell phone _he_ uses to communicate with his brothers sounds: it's _her_.

"We found three more potentials in Kiev, I need you to check them in. If they pass the test, they’ll see the truth thanks to our eyes."

When _he_ verifies one of the three photos she has sent him, his eyes expand tearfully.

"You don’t change, Kostya. Your tastes don’t change…"

Keeps on loving the angels.

He continues to seek to appease the loneliness that has always sunk him in the sadness within the deepest, densest, grey fog that so blinded keeps the world and far away from truth.

Far away from freedom.

.

.

.

**X**

 

 

He doesn’t pay enough attention to what happens; his mind stayed before that big house in flames. Kostyantyn feels that he’s stuck in a loop that only returns him to that scene, to him contemplating how the house burned and burned and left nothing of those who had been so happy there, nothing more than ashes.

And it was _him_. And how guilty he feels to have allowed _him_ to do something like that.

Now, he’s with Mother, Hanna, Jandiara, Alva and Artem. Hanna, in addition, is accompanied by Rob, his assistant, that robust American of beautiful dark skin that, according to Mother, has spent the last eighty years with her, involved in an intimate relationship.

Eighty years being companions, what he would like to have with Nikita.

What he may never have if things keep going like this.

He observes Hanna and tries to listen to her, but he doesn’t succeed; just thinks about the flames and only manages to see them over her, so lovely mature woman, of delicate appearance and formal clothes, office ones, but of so warm and sweet presence; with such frank eyes and hair so grey. She’s older than average _shadows_ , looks like an eternal fifty years old lady that, along with the eternal twenty-five of Rob, look extravagant, but beautiful.

What’s an age difference of this kind when you are a _shadow_? Nothing more than a number.

He smiles despite all the sadness he feels, he does it because he thinks about love, and thinking about love only means thinking about Nikita and the kisses in the darkness of the bookstore; instantly, he returns to the initial state, that of serious gesture that contains with abysmal forces all the tears that it yearns to shed.

It’s his fault. _He_ was his responsibility and…

"Mélovin, can I ask you something?" Hanna says from one second to the other, her voice low and full of experiences.

"Of course," he replies, imperturbable, being Mélovin and not Kostya.

Hanna gets up from the silk-covered armchair she has before an elegant desk in her office, where she has met with the most powerful people in Ukraine representing Dark Silence. She walks around the desk, gives a caress to Rob's muscular arm and moves towards Kostyantyn with languid steps. She sits next to him when Artem, who was on his right, gives the seat to her.

Hanna takes his hand: she knows, as well as everyone present, why what has happened is extremely delicate for him.

"Why do you think _he_ warned us?"

Kostyantyn frowns, as if doing so might help him to stop seeing flames over everyone.

"Because…"

He doesn’t talk anymore, he doesn’t get it; the words choke him. Noticing it, Hanna squeezes the hand that hasn’t released yet.

"I… I have no idea,” Kostyantyn says at last. "I don’t understand how they work, whenever I think I can learn to read their movements I don’t get it. I mean…" He stops again: he needs to think and do it fast, as quickly as possible. "I have based on years of records throughout Europe and part of Asia when I started studying them. I only know that they’re extremely elusive, that they kill humans directly, usually indoors, and that sometimes they only kill people, don’t feed on them or turn them in _shadows_. I only know that, and this is the first time I've seen them kill _shadows_ and use those weapons. Sometimes they have years without giving signals, I found potholes of up to eight years, and that probably only means that they moved well enough not to leave traces that were suspicious.”

"It means that this warning is a very obvious anomaly," Hanna deduces.

Kostyantyn nods.

"Exactly, they never do things like that."

Mother gets up from the single chair that she was using in front of the desk and sits on the last one with her legs crossed. He has already changed the Iron Maiden T-shirt, bloodied by Borysko; now, wears one of Kiss’s _Dinasty_.

"We don’t even know how many they are," she says thoughtfully, though with that grace that never leaves her. "We only suppose, without enough evidence, that they respond to a leader."

To the leader of black eyes. That's what Kostyantyn thinks he knows, although he doesn’t know if that image corresponds to a dream or reality. Since he knows he has no proof of that, he doesn’t mention it; he has done it in the past and only Mother paid attention. The others, nothing: they assured that it was a dream.

"And what else do we know?" Rob asks with his arms crossed, always standing by Hanna's chair, who keeps holding a Kostyantyn's hand.

"They dress in white; it's something they do strictly," Kostyantyn says.

"There’re no records prior to 1975, and among all the records that exist we cannot gather forty traces to date," adds Artem, his research partner.

"They’re mainly in Eastern Europe, with very few exceptions, one in Israel, one in Jordan, one in…" Kostyantyn looks at his knees: he wears jeans torn in that area, as black as his shirt, boots and hair; he’s too dispersed and only sees fire. "In addition, in the last three years they’ve always appeared around Ukraine, although without ever appearing in Kiev: two cases in Belarus, three in Russia, one in Romania, one in Moldova, one in Odessa. They’ve moved in very well-traced circles around Kiev.”

"And, finally, they appear in Kiev." Hanna sighed; as Kostyantyn well knows, a _shadow_ only sighs when it really feels the need to do so. "I have a theory, but I can’t rely on anything other than your case, Mélovin."

His case…

1986, Odessa, Soviet Union. An eighteen-year-old human is turned into a _shadow_ by a stranger. Deceives and forces his boyfriend to turn into it too, with whom he had around a year of secret romance, well they feared that their families wouldn’t accept such a relationship between two men. Until then, the first hadn’t shown suspicious attitudes; since shortly before his transformation, he had begun to change the discourse.

 

 

"Freedom is about opening your eyes to the world. It’s not about finding people in the fog, but about disappearing the fog forever!"

 

 

That's what that boy said to his boyfriend, until one night in April, 1986, in a highly risky way and after turning him by persuading him with lies, he had led him to wake up in a strange place.

And they don’t have more data available. Kostyantyn doesn’t have it, he doesn’t remember what happened after, only has remnants of images that he doesn’t know if come from a dream or reality, and screams that still echoes in his ears.

 

 

"THEY’RE LYING TO YOU, KOSTYA!"

 

 

"Mélovin, do you hear me?" Hanna asks.

Kostyantyn takes a deep breath.

"Sorry, tell me…"

"I think _he_ ’s looking for you and that _he_ has left the evidence on purpose. He keeps thinking as before, but is trying to save you, because _he_ knows what your talent is as a _shadow_ and _he_ ’s sure that you’ll understand what _he_ ’s telling you. In fact, _he_ has achieved it: here you are, with the evidence in your hands."

Kostyantyn releases Hanna’s hand. Looks at Mother, looks at her waiting for her to tell him that Hanna is crazy.

Mother just nods.

"I agree," she says, sad. "My love, I think _he_ still loves you, and takes advantage of the missions assigned to him, of which we have no way of knowing details, to tell you to step aside, because Dark Silence is his enemy and _he_ doesn’t want to hurt you."

Kostyantyn looks at Artem; he doesn’t look at him. With that, he says enough.

Without further ado, he gets up, walks to the centre of the room and looks at Mother once more.

"I fell into his trap, then."

To his surprise, Mother disagrees.

"On the contrary: I think that, without wanting it, _he_ has helped us. At least it’s what we could conclude with so little information."

"It’s very likely that you are right, that they plan something big and they’ll start in Kiev,” Artem says.

"Well done, spoiled child," Jandiara adds. "Your ex gave us an excellent hand: Kiev is the city with the least _shadows_ per human in all Eastern Europe; in proportion, we are at a disadvantage here; maybe, as you have guessed, this is part of their strategy."

Another sigh. Kostyantyn is undone and only longs to run away. But he cannot.

There’s no way.

"Then, we have only one thing left,” Hanna says.

"Ask the government for help," Mother says, nodding. "The information they give us is not enough to draw conclusions; we need to be alert to any minimal detail. The other option would be to use perceptives, but…"

"How many are left in Kiev?" Artem asks.

"Two," Alva says. "Rob and me."

"And my talent is not as latent as Alva's, so I almost don’t count as one,” Rob adds, always solemn.

"What?! There were not seven?" Mother asks in an almost amused tone.

"Five were part of Borysko's _family_ , which is why, among other things, we appreciated their help so much," Hanna explains, looking at Rob.

Five perceptives, together? Kostyantyn crosses his arms. As he knows, among the more than ten talents that are observed with more or less intensity among the _shadows_ , that of the perceptives is one of the least commons. On average, they’re less, much less than others. Interestingly, in Europe they’re even less common than in the rest of the world. That there were five together is curious, but he has no way, not now, of making conjectures based on unfounded assumptions.

He needs to investigate first.

Hanna smiles with thin, slightly wrinkled lips after a sharp silence. She approaches Rob and holds his hand. "It's not much, but we have something to organize ourselves on. This is what we’ll do: Mother and I’ll talk to the government and alert them to the situation; if they want nothing to get out of control, because we don’t know what these people plan with humans, they’ll have to cooperate. Mélovin, you and Artem will review all the information they give us once Mother and I get it. Alva and Rob will patrol and seek to locate these people, but they’ll do so in large groups; we need strong _shadows_ that can fight any attempt to counterattack; the latter is vital considering what happened to Borysko and the others."

"Here I am, Hanna." Jandiara crosses her arms and shows her fangs. "We're going to tear them apart; I’ll gather as many strong _shadows_ as I can."

"And we have to adjust the vigilance, I’ll take care of that," Hanna says, and concludes the meeting not without denoting dissatisfaction: there's very little they can do for the moment.

One by one, everyone retires sunk in a notorious hermeticism, all but Kostyantyn, who, exhausted for the night with more emotional ups and downs than he remembers to have experienced, throws himself in the seat where he was at the beginning.

The door is closed. When he sighs believing that he’s alone, a white hand alerts him that, in fact, he’s not.

"You're different, Mélovin."

He looks up: it's Alva, who smiles softly at him. She offers her hand to him; Kostyantyn doesn’t accept it.

"A lot of things happened…" he says not without coldness, the one he always has with those who aren’t Mother or Artem.

Or Nikita, whose face, for all that has happened, feels as distant as close, as clear as ghostly.

Why did it have to happen now? Why did he meet Nikita at such a delicate moment? Why cannot he get lost in the joy, in the feeling, if…?

"I don’t mean that." Alva cuts his thoughts in two, she does so with the sweeping tenderness of her soft and calm voice. "You look radiant, beautiful, and the energy flows in a very different way around you.”

Embarrassed, Kostyantyn looks down.

"Don’t use your talent with me."

The only thing left is that a perceptive analyses him.

"I've never done it, but now it's impossible: I feel you every moment, Mélovin. Even from a distance, no matter where you are or where I am: I feel you, and I feel something beautiful when I do so." She bends before him with a charming smile on her beautiful angel face. Kostyantyn smiles when she reminds him of Nikita thanks to the delicacy of her features. "I’ve always been struck by your energy, or rather your lack of energy; you're always off, cancelled, less when you sing."

Kostyantyn remembers a detail, that Alva is one of those who always go to see him when he sings with Mother in some meeting, party or celebration of Dark Silence, sometimes for few _shadows_ and sometimes for a lot, like the last night in Lisbon before returning to Ukraine: he had sung seven songs and a multitude of _shadows_ had applauded, and danced, and sung with him.

And Alva was in the front row.

And now Alva describes what he, with his basic perception as a _shadow_ , felt in Nikita the first time.

"I like many of your songs, especially _never give up, never give up oh oh_ … 'Unbroken', right?" Touched as a child by the compliment that most moves him, the one who refers to his music, Kostyantyn nods. "You have a beautiful energy when you sing, as precious as mom's, which is a lot to say, but when you step off the stage it’s as if you disappeared from the face of the Earth. Since we arrived in Ukraine, however…"

"It's different?"

"It's the opposite: now, you have the same energy as when you sing, you have it all the time, and since a few nights it's been growing, and it's been growing, and it’s been growing without stopping, as if you had connected a source of energy to you and didn’t stop feeding on it."

Nikita.

Kostyantyn realizes that Alva lies: whether or not, she’s using a bit of all her talent with him.

Because only the perceptives are able to read in deep detail the energy movements around people and _shadows_ , among other things.

"I perceive an exchange between your energy and that of someone else, someone with an energy very similar to yours, although of another nature.”

Because he’s human, of course.

"Everything feels…" Alva concludes "very pure."

Kostyantyn answers the smile that Alva gives him.

"Yes, it feels that way…"

And that's why he should take care of him.

Not without sadness, Kostyantyn understands something: he must take care of him, yes.

He must, even if he doesn’t want to do so in the most recommendable way.

"I hope everything goes well, Mélovin. If you need something and I can be of help, count on me."

Kostyantyn takes her hand, squeezes it and thanks her by nodding.

Sometimes, he forgets that he also has others, that not everyone has bad intentions, that he’s fortunate to play such an important role in his community and for his community. The past made him too distrustful.

It's time to open his eyes, maybe.

"Okay," he says smiling at her with the tenderness that only Kostya usually expresses, the same one who makes an inhuman effort, and useless before a perceptive, to hide the sadness that has nailed him to the deepest part of his chest.

If to protect him he must postpone him, then...

 

**…**

 

He has been sleeping almost all Saturday afternoon those hours that, in the night, he passed awake and nervous. Is that the nightmare with the white woman, and the chill, and the doubts…

And the fact of not being able to forget again that Kostyantyn is a vampire.

Just at sunset he wakes up again, he does it with a noticeable weariness expressed in his aching body. Uncomfortable, gets in the shower, and under the hot water evokes all the strange images of the previous night, from the inconceivable beauty, unexpected, to be in Kostyantyn’s arms until the ghostly white woman that his unconscious forced him to see.

Why did he have to dream something like that?

Is it a sign that he should take things more calmly?

He hugs himself under the water that, by its temperature, raises steam around his body. Kostyantyn has filled a void that Nikita felt for too long. He has no idea of what they are now, because after kissing there wasn’t time to talk, not enough, but something worries him, that feels as the hot drops slip through him.

He told him that he will help him to value his own feelings, that he will listen to him; he also told that he will be able to hear him. They will be together in what they need so much to share with someone. It sounds beautiful, yes. In theory.

Maybe that part works, that of the audience before the audience and the artist before the artist, but what about the other?

Why Kostyantyn left so suddenly while kissing him, if he had just asked him if he wanted to continue…?

He rubs his face when he realizes how confused is. Despite the joy that triumphed in the bookstore, on that walk where everything felt so natural, something is out of place.

Nikita looks at his hands and how the water bounces against his palms.

He likes a man. And no, he’s not an ordinary man; he’s a vampire that Nikita doesn’t know anything about, but that he kills to extend his eternity. Or that is supposed, since Kostyantyn has explained little of his nature, since he had only told him that beings like him have a different energy.

What else does he knows? There’re more _shadows_ , but Kostyantyn cannot talk about it.

Is it possible that they get involved beyond being an audience and an artist at the same time? Is it possible, considering everything that Kostyantyn must hide from him because he’s a supernatural being?

It's okay to get carried away by this?

Should he stop…?

" _Schona_ … _Schone_ … _Shoenlenjen_ …" he whispers with clear difficulty.

The white woman had spoken to him in a language he doesn’t know. He’s not sure about what it was, although it didn't sound like a Slavic one. Maybe it doesn’t even exist and everything is part of his imagination.

But how inevitable to think about that despite having promised that there was no point in doing so.

Annoyed, he gets out of the shower.

He dresses in dark and simple clothes of always, jeans, a pullover, everything in black; he dries his hair by rubbing it with some violence. Disappointed despite the shower, he realizes that he doesn't have aspirins, and that one would not hurt, because everything hurts already, and that taking a breath of air wouldn’t hurt either.

The light of day has already left very recently when he leaves his apartment to go to the pharmacy that is three blocks away. Walks with the headphones singing random songs of a very mixed list of pop, rock, ballads, whatever, which stops only when the pharmacist serves him. Buys the aspirins, walks one block and brakes very close to a corner, waiting for the change of the traffic light.

As always happens to him with Justin Timberlake’s 'Cry me a river', the song is capable of transporting him to another dimension only at the beginning. He’s in his world, so immersed in it that he doesn’t pay attention to anything or anyone, only to the song and what it says. He has never identified with the lyrics, maybe a bit when he broke up with his ex after she decided to return to her native Estonia to try her luck with her beautiful voice, but not that much, not at the level he perceives as rancorous in Justin; Britney must have hurt him a lot, he feels that way and always stays that way.

Kostyantyn said that the person who converted him was the one who most disappointed him.

Have they hurt him that much too?

Why did he have to go away so suddenly…?

He’s thinking about that when the first chorus of the song begins; Nikita sings in whispers and advances a step when the traffic light changes, but he stops, or rather something stronger than himself, something to which he doesn’t find explanations, it stops him. He turns his head, and while Justin sings in his ears, he runs towards an old woman who has just stumbled beyond the corner, which finds lying on the ground next to a wooden cane.

He takes off his headphones, which are hanging from his neck, to help her stand on the sidewalk.

"Are you okay?" he asks as he takes her from a shoulder with his gloved hand, both under the subtle snow that falls and falls in slow motion from the sky.

The old woman groans in pain and weeps a thousand and one "thank you" when Nikita forces her to stand up, something that costs him a little more than he would like, like everything in life.

And a chill run through him.

And a cold white hand rests on his, and not even the glove avoids him of feeling that, the coldness.

"Madam, let us help you," says in Russian, on the other side of the old woman, who holds Nikita by the hand.

He looks up, disturbed by the power of the chill.

What a sweet boy he finds.

They raise the lady together; she thanks them a thousand more times and says that she doesn't know what happened, that she just fell, that surely was the snow, among other things between "thank you" and "thank you". The boy asks if she needs help crossing the street and the old lady smiles at them.

"Please…" she says.

The boy looks at Nikita; he doesn't hold his hand anymore, but with his dark eyes makes enough. Nikita looks down at the discomfort he causes him.

The boy is so tall and almost as white as Kostyantyn, and his harmonious and delicate face makes him look like fifteen years old, at most, although he probably has about eighteen. His body, slender and thin, is covered in white clothes, although underneath this one he brings a black T-shirt whose sleeves cover part of his palms.

Maybe because of the height, something in the boy reminds him Kostyantyn. Perhaps because of the memory, the inevitable need to marvel at his sweet beauty for a moment.

He’s losing his mind and any minimal thing disturbs him.

They cross the street, the old lady thanks again and continues on her own. Nikita knows that the boy is still with him, but he chooses not to look at him.

Without understanding why, he feels he cannot.

That he shouldn't, rather.

"’ _Cause I've already cried. Ain't gonna cry no more, yeah_ …" he hears him sing.

Nikita notices that, resting on his neck, the headphones continue sounding, that the boy has just sung the final part of 'Cry me a river', that he has done it with a beautiful voice, simply amazing, as sweet as his features and as virtuous as a professional. Nikita looks at him, impressed.

"Y-You sing very well…" he says, although he regrets instantly.

Why?

"You too."

"Huh?"

"Before the lady stumbled, I heard you singing in whispers." The boy talks moving a lot his hands; his arms, as thin as his legs, denote something that Nikita perceives as tender, as childish, as innocent, although it also denotes an enormous teenage enthusiasm, such is the energy with which he speaks. "You were in your own world… And you sing beautiful! I really like Justin, he has good songs, right?"

Nikita watches the boy with a huge intrigue, which seizes him by the look that the boy returns to him: his eyes look sad, but his smile is radiant; his gestures are those of a simple boy, there’s a kind of purity in them, and in his eyes a greater force seems to be contained, as if that boy…

 _As if he were touched,_ he thinks _._

"Yes, I like Justin too," Nikita says when he hears the start of Michael Jackson's 'Earth song'.

"He's very talented, yes! Did you like NSYNC too? I like a lot of their songs! Oh, and that's from Michael! What an underrated song is 'Earth song'; the lyrics are amazing and he sang it with a lot of feeling!"

When listening to him in detail, Nikita notices something strange in his way of speaking: he talks in Russian, not in Ukrainian, which isn't strange in Ukraine, but his accent is peculiar. He's not from Kiev; probably, he's not from Ukraine itself, but from Russia, perhaps, or from some other country in Eastern Europe.

But his eyes… So sad, but full of so much brightness, so emotional, so close to the explosion.

He thinks about asking if he's okay, but the boy's smile, effusive and contagious, makes him uncomfortable. In some way, he does, and that's why Nikita opts for the most convenient.

"Oh, yeah… Michael was the best and… Well, I have to go."

"Okay." The boy smiles even more. "Are you going there?" he asks, and points to the street on the right.

Nikita thanks not to have to lie.

"No, I'm going to the other side, S-See you later…"

"See you!"

They separate, and each one takes his course. Nikita takes steps and steps forward, until a chill run through him again.

He brakes.

He turns.

The boy is looking at him from a distance with his face turned back slightly, smiling at him with explicit tenderness and without stopping walking towards the front.

Without knowing what to think, Nikita turns his back on him and leaves at full speed, but doesn't manage to advance three meters when another chill stalks him, and another, and another even stronger.

Nervous, brakes in the next corner; when he turns, there’s no one around.

Runs the distance that is left, runs at full speed with the headphones passing songs around his neck; he runs so fast that he doesn't even know if he still feels those strange chills.

Upon reaching his building, recovers the air lost once on the other side of the door.

There’re no doubts: he has been too excited about Kostyantyn.

He has given himself up to an undue attraction that only will bring him problems, anguish and the unbearable feeling that he has even now, between more and more chills.

For being naive, for letting himself be carried away as always happens to him and for which everything always goes wrong, he has given power over his heart to a dangerous person-not-person.

That has given him a kind of paranoia.

That has made him lose more than winning.

 

**…**

 

Caresses _Carmilla_ with tender eyes. Passes a few pages, reads some sentences, and sighs helplessly.

How silly she was.

Someone knocks, and she closes the book with the same peace with which she always opens it.

"Come in!" Mother exclaims, leaving _Carmilla_ on her lap.

Kostyantyn approaches shyly; it shows in his gesture that he hasn't spent good hours, that something worries him, and a lot.

"Look," Mother shows _Carmilla_. "Do you remember when we acted it?"

Kostyantyn's smile is deformed; it becomes a sketch of too many feelings, of an immeasurable joy mixed with a fierce anguish.

"I remember."

Mother doesn't need to be perceptive, not with Kostyantyn: he’s devastated. Knowing it, she inquires:

"Are you going to see Nikita?"

And everything in his face falls: sad, he denies.

"I don't."

"You don't?!"

"No… I can’t, _mama_."

"Why not?!"

"T-Too many things have happened! I can’t be irresponsible, lose myself in my feelings when they’re killing _shadows_ and…”

"But…!"

"No, I can’t…"

"Kostyantyn, no."

Mother drops the book to the ground as she lunges at him, who lets himself be hugged by her, still sad. Mother doesn't even reach his shoulders, not without the unusually high heels she usually wears and doesn't have right now, but she presses him against her, and kisses his chest, and caresses with his cheeks precisely there.

"Sweetie, you have suffered a lot. You have spent more than thirty years denying yourself everything, without allowing yourself to forget everything that happened. You aren’t responsible for everything _he_ does, stop assuming responsibilities that aren't yours."

Because that's what he has done all these years: search, search and search. Until two years ago he found the first great trace, which led him to many others. Until he saw Ukraine as the possible epicentre of the future conflict and Mother decided that everyone would come here.

And he was right, it seems, but that's not why…

"I can't…"

"Why?"

"You need me here. I have to help to find _him_ , I have to destroy _him_ for everything _he_ 's doing. I have to catch _him_ , _mama_!"

"We have to catch _him_ , yes, but _everyone_ , I'm not going to let you deny what you feel for this conflict."

"But…"

"Nothing: it’s an order. Go with Nikita, hug him and try to get distracted a bit by him. You worry too much for believing that what _he_ ‘s doing is your fault. Guess what! It’s not. And, anyway, we cannot do much until we get the help of the forces of security; we are a _network_ that has no way of dealing with something so big alone; we aren’t cops or detectives, only _shadows_ that try to help humans when humans need it and, meanwhile, remain in the darkness in silence. This happened to underestimate those who are causing this, and that wasn't your fault; it was mine."

" _Mama_ …"

" _Uhhhh_ , _I don't want to die_ …" Mother sings without being able to avoid it. "I love you, son, and I want you to take care of this, to help us with your talent, but I also want you to be happy, so I allow you to take that break, okay? And I want you to enjoy it, to smile, to take care of your own feelings, because what you told to Nikita it was true! You have to give them importance; I want you to not forget that. If things get worse, I promise to ask you to explain to Nikita that you need to be absent for a while."

She feels how he embraces her, how he seems to disarm on her, how Kostyantyn trembles for a deep, elemental emotion, for a consolation that he needed and that has finally reached the most sensitive confines of his conceptual heart. Mother caresses him on the back: how much she loves him and for what powerful reasons.

So many that she can never tell him.

"Sweetie…"

"Yes?"

"Come here."

Mother releases him and takes him by the hand. She takes him to the piano bench in her rehearsal room, she sits next to him and she does what she needs without hesitation: with her longest and sharpest nail, that from her middle finger of the left hand, cuts the skin above her right breast.

Kostyantyn leans back.

"No…"

"Yes. Take it from me, go on." Mother wraps Kostyantyn's cheeks with her hands and pulls him towards the wound.

" _Mama_ , I feel…"

"Shame?"

"You know that, yes! Y-You aren’t anyone else…!"

If it were possible to blush being a _shadow_ , blush as humans do, Kostyantyn would be dyed red. Mother laughs as she kisses his lips for a moment.

"Listen to me," she begs, calmly, as if saying the most trivial thing in the world, "my blood is very old and very powerful. If you drink a little of me, you can be more relaxed with Nikita. You’ll bear more to be with him without wanting his blood. It's for you to _have fun_ today."

" _Mama_!"

"Come on, take it!"

And Mother exerts her supernatural strength on Kostyantyn’s neck, who ends, reluctantly, on the wound that’s on her chest. Mother breathes deeply as she feels him suck gently.

They share sighs, hers respectful of his modesty, his full of guilt. Mother will always find sweet this tenderness of him for her.

And no, he will never know.

"Enough…" she says, forcing him to release her, something that Kostyantyn has difficulty to do due to the instinct that prevents the _shadows_ from getting away from the blood once they taste it.

When Kostyantyn gets apart, he doesn't look at her; the times they have done this, he always had the same reaction. Mother cleans a trickle of blood that falls from the right corner of his mouth with a finger. With the fingertip, she paints her own lips and licks them.

"Go for him, champion," she says by patting his arm.

Kostyantyn only looks at her for a second: what gratitude she reads in his eyes.

He deserves to be happy. No matter how tense the situation is, he deserves it.

She knows it better than anyone and will not allow _anyone else_ to express their opinion, not if it’s specifically about him.

 

**…**

 

After meeting that strange boy and the unbearably intense feeling that has overwhelmed him on his way to his apartment, after realizing that the strange sensations aren’t over despite having accepted Kostyantyn in his life, Nikita doesn’t have a hard time defining himself: it’s still difficult for him to feel better about himself, he doesn’t value his own feelings enough, and what he’s doing is clinging to something that makes him feel good, which isn’t positive when so many mysteries reign; until he’s not clear about what Kostyantyn intends and how much he must bear to keep him close, he cannot let him move forward, not in him, in his own life.

He’s not ready for this. Not now, with his heart so weak and exhausted.

He knows himself: he knows that when he grows fond of someone, he does so with an overwhelming passion. He still doesn’t believe himself in that state, not enough to lose control of his own instincts; Kostyantyn is a presence that he would love to have in his life, he knows it for all the joy, empathy and understanding that has flowed between them in the bookstore, but he cannot give more place than prudent to a person who fills him with doubts and not with certainties.

He has to be realistic: he doesn't know anything about him.

Anything.

How to give so much free rein to what he already feels, to the physical attraction, so evident in the chemistry that has flowed so well between them, added to the tremendous admiration that he feels for him, for his heart, for his voice expressing his heart? How, if Kostyantyn is a vampire who he knows nothing about?

He decides it when the hour of the meeting approaches; he will try to be cold, get answers, know what he wants, find out something about him. He cannot get excited like that, he cannot be so stupid.

Actually, the only problem he has, although admitting it’s difficult to him, is that relationships give him vertigo, the same as Kostyantyn himself made him feel at first. The only problem is that, that he’s afraid, that he’s terrified at the slightest thought.

What if he grows fond of him in vain?

What if getting carried away by this different attraction is wrong?

What if a person who he cares about leaves him again…?

He takes a deep breath sitting on the bed, without shoes, but with thick socks, with his black jeans and his woollen pullover of greater size than the one corresponding to him, being of rather medium body build. They agreed that Kostyantyn would touch the window glass of his balcony in half an hour.

Nikita looks towards it, anguished.

He doesn’t want another end. No, not now, not with all the fear that lurks even in his dreams, which is presented to him in the strangest ways through nightmares and chills that he wants to make disappear.

He hugs his knees: no, he doesn’t want that. He doesn’t want to be more afraid, he doesn’t want to be alone, he doesn’t want to grow fond of him in vain.

He just wants to be happy.

Looking at the window, he lets himself be carried away by the force that drags him out, desperate for a relief amid so much tension.

Meanwhile, Kostyantyn has twenty minutes on the corner of his building, sunk in a shadow, still under the snow that continues to fall gently.

Mother told him not to refuse to see Nikita, but he cannot help feeling guilty. _He_ ‘s his responsibility, because he should have caught _him_ , years ago, but that damn has been so elusive…

"It's not fair…" he whispers watching the snow fall before his eyes.

He has waited so long to return to Ukraine, so long, and as if Ukraine had tried to give him a welcome gift, he has crossed Nikita along the way, to Nikita at the appointed time, before it was too late, on the edge of the abyss because of unhappiness.

He promised too many things without thinking about the care he should have, letting himself be carried away like a teenager in love, the same one that had been once. But he cannot fail, not to that heart that deserves to get ahead.

Looks to the balcony of the eighth floor: no, he cannot fail.

Above all, he _doesn’t want_ _to_ do so.

If he has learned something in all these years is that nothing is in vain, is that everything has a reason. If Nikita has appeared now and not before, if he has done it in Ukraine on the night of the reunion, if his voice has managed to awaken him in the depths of his conceptual heart, then there must be a reason.

This, perhaps, _should be_ like this.

And he wants to be.

Less than half an hour is left for the agreed meeting time, but it doesn’t matter anymore. Climbs through the shadows, those in which beings like him can move at incredible speed, as if they could become an innate part of the darkness. Running on the walls it’s not difficult at all, sneak out of all eyes either; getting to the balcony of the eighth floor only takes a minute to him.

Standing on it, against the metallic railing painted white, Nikita already awaits him.

Kostyantyn looks at him: he has a dark blanket wrapped around his shoulders; dressed in black, looks more beautiful than ever. And what sadness seems to come out of his pores, what indescribable anguish.

"Nikita…"

"I-I felt that you were arriving," he says, serious.

He doesn’t look at him.

A lump in the throat stops Kostyantyn's voice; Nikita isn’t the same as the night before, the one that, because of so many events, feels distant like no other.

“Come in…” Nikita asks quietly.

And no, he doesn't look at him.

Kostyantyn enters in Nikita's apartment with uncertainty beating on his skin. Observes the place on a fast, nervous journey: untidy vinyl next to a table where a turntable doesn’t make sound any of them; a CD and cassette sound system with several albums on top of it forming a more neat than untidy stack; a Smart TV of no more than 22 inches, off; a black keyboard next to a bench, a guitar, a speaker and a microphone; a laptop open on the floor; white and empty walls; an impressive library made of wood and painted black, where at least 200 books are waiting to be taken…

A single bed covered by sheets as white as the empty walls, the same bed where he left him the last time, when he promised he would only kiss him if he allowed it.

“Kostyantyn, I think we should talk.”

He looks at him: Nikita, with his arms crossed and next to the bed that’s so close to the window that faces the balcony, still doesn’t look at him. It shows that he’s very nervous.

“Something happened…?” Kostyantyn asks, and insecurity is all that his voice transmits.

Nikita frowns when he hears him.

“You told me that there’re things that you can’t explain about yourself, about your different nature, and I respect that, but… I have strange sensations and… Is okay for me to trust you even though you can’t tell me in detail about who you are?”

And he doesn't look at him at all.

With pain, Kostyantyn recognizes, in his mind, that Nikita has reasons to ask him something like that. He knows that he has tried to be understanding and that he has probably been content to ask him questions. Maybe, the questions came up after the bookstore, in cold.

It’s fair that he asks him that, just as it’s fair to be honest:

“You’re a human and I’m a _shadow_ ; for my community, this is wrong, Nikita," Kostyantyn says sincerely in a murmur of anguish that, due to the effort that he puts, manages to sound mature enough.

"Is that why you left so abruptly?"

"Yes, because if I’m too passionate with you I could hurt you, something I don’t want to do. If I surpass myself, I could even kill you without really wanting to…”

“That's why it's frowned upon by your community?”

“Yes, it’s one of the reasons.”

“And this will always be the case? Are things that I would never know?”

“There’s… many things that I can never tell you."

“Why?”

“Because it could put your life at risk. If wrong people find out that you know so many things about _shadows_ , they might try to find your silence; if you know only a little, like a lot of other people, more than you maybe think, you’re out of danger. This is also why it’s frowned upon, because our existence can’t come completely to light.”

"And there’re more reasons?"

"Those are the main ones."

"And why did you insist on helping me even though there’re so many things you can’t tell me?"

Kostyantyn closes his eyes for a moment. The answer is how he feels about him and how much he longs to keep him by his life. However, he responds with the most objective reason that he has:

“Because I don’t care if the _shadows_ forbid an intimate contact between one of us and one of yours; I was one of yours once, and still I’m somewhere, and although there’s much I can’t tell you, I want to think that we can _understand_ each other at that precise point, the one that doesn’t require me to tell you the things that I can’t tell you: the human side that I consider that I still have…”

And Nikita looks at him.

And it’s already undeniable, discovers Kostyantyn, that he loves Nikita with more strength than he has or will have.

Yes: he loves him.

It's late to take a step back.

"If you want me to leave…" he whispers, but doesn’t dare to finish the sentence.

“It…” Nikita frowns, swings to one side, swings to the other. He looks at him, and what purity transpires from his dark eyes. “It gives me… joy to have known you, but I can’t help thinking about everything you're hiding from me, because there's a lot that I don’t understand and… and I don't know if it's worth it…"

“Niki…”

How inevitable to say so suddenly, looking at him like this, with monster-eyes marvelling with an angel.

"I feel that someone looks at me, I dream strange things, all give me chills, I get tense, everything becomes confusing! These are things that have been strengthened since I've known you! Does it have something to do with you? Is for you? Is it because I have contact with you?”

Kostyantyn takes a step towards Nikita. Why does he have all those sensations? He doesn't know either, not at all. As he knows, because he has known humans and has had contact with them before, the mere act of interacting with _shadows_ shouldn't generate sensations of that kind, not as a consequence.

Unless…

His face is deformed by surprise.

“Wait…”

Kostyantyn goes through the space that separates them; he approaches to Nikita very, very slowly, and without stopping to look at his eyes for a single moment.

Is it possible that…?

“Listen to me,” he asks, seriously, “In my community, we have constant contact with humans for reasons that I can’t tell you. I don’t remember anyone feeling something like that, at least not with me. But if you want, I'll find out.”

Arms crossed again, Nikita swings. Partly it's nervousness, it's obvious; partly, it seems to be because of the cold.

“Okay… I would appreciate it very much, because it’s very strange and…”

“If you ask me, it sounds pretty awful, as long as a _shadow_ kissing you in the back of a bookstore!”

Kostyantyn smiles when he hears how a soft, short giggle comes from Nikita. The anguish doesn’t leave him, but something seems to relax in him, subtly.

“So…” Nikita drops his arms on either side of his body. “Well, what you say makes sense: there’re things you don't need to tell me to…”

“To we can help each other.”

“That’s it…” Nikita laughs looking at the ground. He’s still very nervous. “But about the kisses…”

Is that what Nikita is worried about? Kostyantyn feels that he has learned to understand his gestures very well, even more than he thought. He's not a perceptive, but Nikita is an open book. In a way, he is.

And he’s an expert in open books, fortunately.

“Nikita, if you're worried that I'll get over you, that I'll hurt you, that I might be a danger to you, I promise I'll never kiss you again,” Kostyantyn says more calmly than he would have thought he could have, because it’s something that hurts him for the obvious feelings that he has for him.

Nevertheless, in Nikita's gesture of surprise he has learned to detect frustration, disappointment.

He sees it now, as clear as water: Nikita doesn’t want to stop kissing him.

He cannot, in fact.

He knows it for a simple reason: Nikita is still surrendered, still has nothing to lose and without valuing his own feelings. He’s not worried about dying, then.

He's worried for something else.

Being a bit daring and challenging, maybe, will help in this delicate conversation:

“To tell you the truth, if you've seen movies, series and read vampire books, there's little I can tell you: in all vampire fiction there's a lot of truth, which means you already know a lot about me.  Although there’re also myths, many, and especially exaggerations. We aren’t as omnipotent as they sometimes paint us; the vampire is a caricature of what _shadows_ really are.”

Nikita's eyes wide open; he wasn't expecting that.

"It means that I already know enough?"

"Especially if you've read the classics. Although in them there’re also exaggerations."

"As which?"

Kostyantyn sees the enthusiasm in Nikita. Little by little, he’s relaxing. He must keep pushing this conversation.

"I can't tell you that," he replies with more seduction than seriousness, remarking each word with special forcefulness.

“And which book is more attached to reality?"

Excellent question. Kostyantyn shows his sharp teeth when smiling.

"Any. Although I’ll give you a small, very small clue…” Even in the seductive attitude, Kostyantyn brings his mouth to Nikita's right ear to continue talking, yes, but in whispers. "Anne Rice did it very well, and although she missed some points and exaggerated others, in fact, she turned more real that exaggerations of the other books."

He moves away from Nikita to read his reaction: he’s full of curiosity.

"And the origin?" Nikita asks. The voice fails him; it’s slightly agitated.

"I already told you something very small about that. Just deduce and you’ll know the answer."

Speaking without speaking, Kostyantyn blinks the light only once.

"Electricity?"

"I don’t know," he responds, and smiles completely delivered to the seductive role.

He cannot give more information than that, not about the top secret of everything that with the _shadows_ is related in the whole world.

Nikita agrees: everything that Kostyantyn is telling him is of interest to him, that he perceives in the frown in front of him.

"So, if I understand correctly, what you can’t do is tell me about your community."

"I have it strictly forbidden."

"Which means that…”

“It doesn’t interfere with the relationship of two people who feel lonely and long to be with each other.”

Nikita looks into his eyes with a fixity overloaded with vulnerability. If he has learned enough about him, Kostyantyn knows what the problem is: he fears illusion. Nikita doesn’t want to get excited about him, that’s to say someone from whom he still doesn’t know enough.

He doesn’t want to be abandoned.

Thinking in that way moves him to the depths. Contains the hug that dies to give him to put his hands in the pocket of his black jean.

That’s the problem, yes. It's that, the abandonment.

"What else are you worried about?" he asks, despite knowing it.

They’re five centimetres away from the other: Kostyantyn, tall and beautiful, looks at him from above with his unequal eyes. Nikita, with his face tilted towards him, contains a nervous laugh.

Everything that Kostyantyn just told him has filled him with illusion again.

That’s wrong?

If the information about his community is not relevant in regards to their bond, if the reason for the nightmares and sensations isn’t him…

If all that’s true, then, between them, there’s only one problem, the one that Nikita has at this very moment, the problem that’s tormenting him the most by the simple fact of having Kostyantyn so close, of feeling him breathe against his mouth despite the fact that beings like him don’t need to do so, if he understands correctly.

The elephant in the room: how much he has lied to himself by making sure he doesn't grow fond of him.

The huge attraction he feels for that vampire.

At the thought, Nikita is agitated: Kostyantyn cannot pass a certain limit, the same limit that he himself wouldn’t want to pass, because modesty still doesn’t let him think about it.

But nothing craves more than to kiss him.

But nothing craves more, although it’s hard to admit, than go beyond any limit.

“A-About what we’re talking before…”

“What, Niki?"

This one laughs. Even that nickname is capable of nullifying his thoughts.

"The kisses…”

“Oh, that.” Kostyantyn comes a little closer; Nikita's eyes scream so loud that it’s as if he managed to shake the whole building: Nikita wants to kiss him, but he cannot.

"What about kisses?" Kostyantyn asks.

"Maybe it's not prudent that… we continue kissing…"

Kostyantyn is lost in the smallest gestures that he reads in Nikita: he’s agitated, his eyes are half-closed, his face is flushed, and his left eyelid trembles. The fingers of his hands look tense, and his shoulders are hard in their place, as if he was on the defensive.

He’s containing himself.

"Are you afraid I'll hurt you?"

Kostyantyn knows that he doesn’t, but he asks anyway with the idea of investigating in another way; Nikita shakes his head to say 'no’, he does it almost unconsciously.

"Why are you afraid then?"

Nikita pulls back as he takes a deep breath. His eyes fill with fear.

He’s terrified.

Actually, more than terrified, Nikita is defeated: he can no longer bear to restrain himself from what he wants to do. Because what destroyed him in the bookstore was that.

That Kostyantyn left.

That Kostyantyn didn’t continue.

“I'm afraid that I like it… too much…”

Because he just doesn’t want to listen to him and be listened by him; he wants that, but he wants the kisses too.

Kostyantyn feels a lump in his throat, again; it was the least expected answer. In means that he's worried about…?

Touched, Kostyantyn doesn’t doubt: he embraces Nikita and kisses him on the lips with an infinite emotion, more in love with him than passionate for him.

Because Nikita's fear is that which Mother had described: there will be a moment where love will need to go further, to where love always deserves to go.

In short, yes, he guessed right: Nikita fears illusion, fears rejection.

He fears abandonment.

Although he doesn’t follow him, not at first, Nikita soon gives in; it takes a few seconds. Embraces Kostyantyn, who feels his arms tighten at his waist, to hang on his neck right after sliding his hands for each side of his body. Kostyantyn leans towards him.

It's not just Nikita's fear; suddenly, he realizes it's his too. This wasn’t the original plan; it was to be accompanied.

But how inevitable for Kostyantyn to put a little pressure on Nikita, enough to make the blanket that covers his shoulders fall, to make him lie on the bed and lie on him.

It’s enough to fall together, one over the other, to make the kiss become more wild than sweet, more passionate than tender; it’s enough to feel one over the other to perceive what both of them already knew: they have a lot of chemistry, so much that it even scares, because its power is more ferocious than that of the sun.

This chemistry may be a problem, or so Kostyantyn thinks when he hears Nikita's uncontrolled breathing, who squeezes him on each side of the waist with nervous, restless, and modest hands.

"T-Turn off the light…" he asks when Kostyantyn releases his lips for a moment with the intention of letting him breathe.

On his mouth.

On him.

On his own breathing, which is also uncontrolled, although for reasons of a different nature.

Kostyantyn stretches his hand towards the night table; he dies a little when he hears how Nikita laughs.

"Did you think I was going to use my powers?"

"You always presume them…" affirms Nikita with a lovely smile on his lips.

Kostyantyn has the switch of the night light between the fingers of his right hand. Looks at Nikita in the eyes and notes the shyness.

"But I want to see you…" he says, faking disappointment.

Nikita responds with a smile that wouldn’t disguise the shame in a million years:

"Maybe I still have… prejudices…"

Kostyantyn laughs against his shoulder without releasing the switch. Continues talking in whispers that are more breath than voice:

"What's wrong with two people who like to kiss each other?"

"Nothing…” Nikita says in the same kind of whispers, which seduces dangerously to Kostyantyn, who prays to Mother and her powerful blood so that Mélovin doesn’t bother him.

Not now, with everything he's enjoying to have Nikita under him for the first time.

"So…?"

"It's just… I don’t know, custom."

"No: it's prejudice, as you said before, and it’s understandable. But relax. That I’m a _shadow_ is what’s really worrying; that we’re men is an insignificant and merely superficial detail; it’s like this here and always."

Nikita looks at him with bright eyes, intoxicated by an indecipherable feeling. Kostyantyn doesn’t know, but what shines in the pupils is admiration. Nikita admires his freedom.

He craves it, too.

"But…"

Kostyantyn knows, when looking at Nikita's eyes, that he understands what he’s saying. Prejudice is more unconscious and has nothing to do with what he feels; it has to do with the world that’s out there, with what he has lived to this day.

Paying attention to the external, now, it has no case.

Kostyantyn turns off the switch, calm, knowing that Nikita feels the same for him. Maybe not love, he doesn’t know, but the joy of having him there, of being together.

That in this shared loneliness they want nothing more than this, than to feel.

A second, and Kostyantyn kisses him again. He does it gently and for just a moment. Resting a hand on either side of Nikita's chest, which hasn’t released the clothing that covers his waist, rises a little above him, enough to stare at him.

"What's your limit?"

Kostyantyn smiles as he looks down a little.

"We find out?"

Nikita nods with a shyness too sweet to be tolerated. How hungry that he gives to Kostyantyn, to think about taking away all that shyness, in getting him to be uninhibited to the point where it only remains to be himself, without reservations, without modesty.

He kisses him, and leans on his knees to not overwhelm him, and hugs him from behind to squeeze him to his chest, while his lips kiss carefully those of Nikita, with the delicacy that needs to not hurt him with his sharp teeth. Nikita wraps his arms around his waist, exerts a force that express the deepest longing, and arches his back for lack of air, and pulls his face aside to catch his own breath.

Kostyantyn looks at his neck when the sound of his agitation, as modest as his half-closed eyelids, makes hunger strike him like a thousand hearts at once.

“This is the limit,” he whispers, and how agitated he’s too.

Nikita stirs beneath him. Kostyantyn perceives certain disappointment in his gesture, although no, it’s not that; it’s incomprehension.

Not of Kostyantyn, but of himself.

“Okay…” Nikita answers without air.

But Kostyantyn kisses him again, he does it with an uncontainable passion, until he turns them to lie in front of the other, sideways on the narrow bed, Nikita on the left, Kostyantyn on the right, who rests his forearm on the pillow and drops his hand on Nikita's tousled curls, which, in turn, lies his head against his elbow, delicately.

They look at each other despite the darkness. Outside, the snow falls gently and is visible thanks to the electric lights of Kiev. Nikita cannot see that image, because he’s turning his back on the window, but Kostyantyn sees everything.

That's how he wants his eternity to be. The snow, Ukraine, Nikita and peace.

He doesn’t need anything else.

Kostyantyn smiles at a Nikita who looks at him as if hypnotized. And he is.

Before those unequal eyes, it’s impossible to avoid that.

“My community is going through a delicate moment of which I can’t talk to you,” Kostyantyn murmurs, one hand in the curls and the other in Nikita's cheek, who shivers for the cold that the vampiric skin is infecting him, “maybe I should be absent sometimes, because they’ll need me, but soon, when it ends, I’ll stay with you as long as you allow me, until you get tired of me.”

Nikita feels that the words impact him with a vehemence capable of ending him. So hypnotized is that he cannot conceive what he says, the mere idea of getting tired of this, of being like this next to him, in the same darkness and feeling the same heat. However, he doesn’t tell him that.

“Okay…” he just answers.

There’re many things floating in the air, ideas, concepts, but everything is as diffuse as the existence of the world outside of that simple room, of those two bodies facing each other on a small bed, whose eyes cannot stop looking. It’s not time to talk, not now.

It’s time to value what they feel for the other, nothing else.

“Sing for me,” asks Kostyantyn with a smile, his middle finger drawing circles around the usual mole.

Nikita closes his eyes; how he can enjoy this much this almost imperceptible caresses that are rather the cold rubbing of a supernatural being? How can he fill his heart with fire so easily? Because that’s what he feels in the chest, fire, fire flaming that burns him and transforms him, that kills him to make him rise again in another kind of incarnation.

He will never get tired, and he doesn't want to know to what extent that’s a problem.

Not now.

“ _Workin’ from seven_ …” he sings at random in a low, thin voice, without having previously chosen it, letting the song that’s the most perfect to get out of his throat, the one that most represents his feelings, “ _to eleven every night_ …”

Kostyantyn dishevels his hair and laughs as he snuggles against his chest.

"How can you sing to me ‘Since I've been loving you’ _now_?” he says while laughing.

"You don’t like it?" Nikita says with his mouth sunken in Kostyantyn's black hair, laughing despite the agitation.

“It fascinates me, Niki, but…” He holds his face with his left hand while with the right he forms more and more curls when entangling strands of hair between his fingers. He looks at him without blinking, with his eyes drugged by love, passion, everything. “If you sing something like that now, you'll force me to take off your clothes…”

Nikita feels that the words sink him into a state of stupor. Everything becomes ghostly around him, everything except Kostyantyn and that half-open gaze that so seduced it looks. More hypnotized than ever, he laughs like a child.

It's too late to be prejudiced, to worry, to question, to be scared: Kostyantyn has already caught him.

He’s already lost in the ghostly reality. Or not: in fact, he has been the whole life there. But now he’s not alone. The question of at what cost it’s worthless; he’s falling in love and there’s no turning back.

“Well, then _… There's a lady who's sure all that glitters is gold and she's buying a stairway to heaven_ …”

When the fingers are intertwined, those of one with those of the other in the tiny space that separates their bodies, Nikita is sure about that.

Between ghosts and darkness, he has found, in an ironic _shadow_ , light. The one with the unequal eyes, half-closed when looking at him.

And he has found his own light, shining between them thanks to his voice, which Kostyantyn accompanies in the following with a smile on his lips.

Which flows naturally with his, like two sounds rediscovering each other after a whole eternity separated.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! Thank you with my life and my soul to you for reading my nonsense. The chapter was long enough and I don't want to bother you anymore, but...
> 
> THANK YOU. ♥
> 
> Thanks for your comments, for share and for your kindness. :')
> 
> JUST THANK YOU FOR MAKE ME SMILE!
> 
> About all the music references, I'm so sorry. This time I put a lot. XD
> 
> The last two, the Led Zeppelin ones, have a reason: I know that Niki is fan of them and I heard him sing a couple of their songs, so I couldn't resist. Since I've been loving you it's the sexiest song ever written (?), and Stairway to heaven it's a masterpiece (and Niki has sung it in a Livestream, so no regrets (?) ).
> 
> I don't know if Mél is fan of them too, BUT I know that Gaga is a fan, so in that case we can think, in this crazy and sick AU, that she introduced the band to him (?). 
> 
> Next chapter maybe will be long too, but not at this point. And the most important moment of this fic will happen very soon. 
> 
> The next chapter, we will know who ***he*** is.
> 
> Aaaaaaaaahhhh (?).
> 
> THANKS FOR READING, SWEET PEOPLE!!! ♥ ♥ ♥


	12. XI

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kostyantyn thinks about the last three weeks. Without clues about Dark Silence's enemies and in his best moment with Nikita, he has his conceptual heart split in two. 
> 
> What will happen? Maybe, he will find out sooner than desired.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Forgive my English, please: I give my best and I hope to get better soon. 
> 
> Thanks for reading. :')
> 
> ♥

**XI**

 

Freddie Mercury, played with justice by actor Rami Malek, sings ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ before Wembley in that legendary Queen performance, and he _is_ him, and gathers in his dream the one that belongs to every artist.

To move the audience with their feelings, to feel with them the same energy flow of emotions by sharing the heart for a fantastic moment, all the heartbeats making the ground tremble, in unison.

The film is about to leave the cinemas, and how fortunate to have arrived just in time to see it, because he didn’t imagine a more perfect date, not between Nikita and him.

Nikita…

He hears him singing parts of the song in whispers. Unable to avoid it, Kostyantyn spies him: his eyes shine like those of a child in him thanks to the tears they contain, while his mouth smiles almost without being able to avoid it, every second a little more. How beautiful he looks lately, very different from the one of three weeks ago, when with a kiss in the bookstore they sealed this bond that doesn't stop evolving, that every second becomes a little more special.

And Nikita spies him too.

And Kostyantyn feels how a sweet despair seizes him.

It's already December 15; outside, Kiev is more beautiful than ever thanks to the snow that covers it. Nikita has already returned to work, so they have seen very little the last week, but things are better than ever between them, because after the conversation on that Saturday, that of them in bed singing Led Zeppelin’s songs and getting rid of all doubt and reproach at the same time, the nightmares are over, the chills too. Nikita, at last free of those curious sensations, has told him not to worry, that they were part of his insecurities, surely, since everything has dissipated since the acceptance. Since that Saturday everything is perfect.

Everything feels a dream since then.

Kostyantyn spies Nikita once again: he's looking around, he's checking something in the movie theater. Curious, the unequal eyes make the same route as the dark eyes: there are five friends in the middle of the movie theater, right in the middle, singing louder than they should in that context; a man and a woman dressed as metalheads located on the left side, near the exit and embraced, seemed to comment the film in whispers. Finally, only them remain, one next to the other at the bottom on the right, with no one around.

The end of the song arrives; Freddie's voice fills the room and the world.

Nikita curls up on his shoulder. With one hand, he caresses the coldness of his, precisely the one that Kostyantyn has posed on the armrest closest to him.

" _Anyway the wind blows_ …" Nikita whispers.

If this isn’t the most special moment of his entire existence, Kostyantyn has no idea what it is.

They leave the cinema shortly after, excited by that ideal, that Freddie Mercury invincible before public in Wembley.

"Whenever I see Freddie like that," Kostyantyn says, "I remember Kurt Cobain describing how happy Freddie seemed to be on stage, with people's love."

"Been happy with people's love…" Nikita says when listens to him. His words aren’t an answer; rather, they are like a sigh, like a longing.

“Cobain mentioned it in his suicide note: he said he couldn’t be happy like that, like Freddie before people," he adds seriously.

“I don’t know much about Cobain," Nikita responds with the same seriousness, "but I've always thought that massiveness wasn’t for someone like him.”

“In which sense?” Kostyantyn asks, curious.

“I don’t say it because he didn’t deserve it; he was a great artist, especially a great composer: his lyrics were much deeper than many were able to understand. But…” With a pause, Nikita fills the dialogue with a strange mysticism. Kostyantyn, soon, feels that the seriousness is so real, so true, that it almost seems to be tangible. “Massive success attracts falsehood. As you say: the number isn’t important. Cobain didn't need to access that many people unable to understand him to prove who he was; maybe, for him, for someone as sensitive as him, it would have been healthier not to achieve mass. I think that if he had continued in the underground, playing for those who did understand his message and sensitivity, he wouldn't have ended as he ended. I don't know…” Another pause, and Kostyantyn notices how a smile forms on Nikita's lips for a single second; the next one, he returns to seriousness. “I've always felt that: the industry and its injustice to the artists took him away.”

Kostyantyn finds himself sighing for sadness.

"It can be," he says, and they both sink into silence.

They are walking towards Nikita's apartment. Joy reigns despite the last dialogue, it feels particularly intense today. What’s different? Kostyantyn tries to analyse it, but doesn't succeed.

The silence they keep in the following streets (interrupting the happiness should be considered the real sin) leads him to review:

Some hours after those kisses interrupted by Led Zeppelin’s songs, Nikita fell asleep next to him; until that, they talked and talked about music, which pleased Kostyantyn, because not only allowed him to show off a bit of all his knowledge, but also allowed him to know more about Nikita's tastes, who showed to oscillate between rock of the 70s, 80s and 90s and pop of the 2000. Curious, and with exceptions, many of them related to Ukrainian artists, but that was what prevailed. He, whose favourite artist will always be Mother, talked to him about everything, except her.

Difficult, but he succeeded.

The following Sunday, they went to the bar with open mic together. Kostyantyn stood up to applaud the Eurovision girl, as he likes to call her: the Jamala's ‘1944’ version that she had just interpreted had been the best he had heard; had transported him to another dimension.

Wonderful.

“I love this song…” he whispered to Nikita as he sat down, still clapping.

When the girl came down from the stage, Nikita asked Kostyantyn if he wanted to sing with him; he chose not to do it.

"Let me see you."

Because he loves to sing, he loves it more than anything on Earth, but having a moment to listen to Nikita on stage was something to take advantage of.

Nikita sang an Irina Bilyk's song, 'A ya plyvu', in a slower version, a dreamlike one, that left Kostyantyn speechless. He knew what Nikita was capable of, he thought he knew, but knowing other nuances in his voice moved him deeply. Everyone present applauded until tired: the original version is sensual, very sensual, as sensual as Irina in that old video clip, showing the breasts below a wet dress and, therefore, semi-transparent, challenging and self-confident; Nikita's version, on the other hand, lost all the sensuality in the hands of the tenderness of his voice: his version was much more emotive, epic.

Great.

In that word he thought until, the moment before the final chorus, Nikita changed something: added a scream where Irina, as he remembered, just paused to give a moment to the guitar.

And what a scream.

"What the fuck…"

He couldn’t say it otherwise: he had never heard or seen him sing like that; he was as possessed, given body and soul to the song, that for a moment it stopped belonging to Irina; it was his and nobody else's.

The scream left him confused. Turn him into _shadow_? Denying humanity that voice and feelings? He told himself what Mother had told him, that it would be his decision.

But he knew, very soon, that he couldn’t. He wanted to; somewhere, in his conceptual heart, he wanted to turn him at that precise moment, immediately, but he couldn't. And the saddest thing, he knew when he saw how the bar exploded in applause, was that, from one second to the next, he knew that he loved him more than before.

That was going to get harder sooner than desired: he had underestimated not only the ability to love of his conceptual heart; he had underestimated Nikita and all the love that he could give birth inside of this one.

“Did… Did you like it?" he heard him ask; the applause had finally stopped and a boy with dreadlocks set the microphone to start singing another song, which Kostyantyn never heard, because the scream continued to resound in his memory.

"Are you kidding me? You left me speechless, I don’t know what to say…" he said looking at him with extreme emotion.

"The other day I heard it on the radio and I thought of you… It was…" Nikita fixed his eyes on the table; a smile that creased all the skin of his face, honest and radiant, manifested in his mouth. "It was for you…"

"Niki…"

Nothing else could tell him. He smiled at him, he did it with more love than, maybe, he had to demonstrate in public, and he shared with Nikita an intense gaze that seemed to scream the same; behind him, with demarcated violence, he felt how a glance was fixed on him without any mercy.

While Nikita sat and asked for something to drink, Kostyantyn turned to the last table: the Eurovision girl looked at him with hatred, one so big that could be felt in the air, that could dissipate all the energy around him.

It was like a huge wave: in a second, it had completely crushed him and the reality itself.

“I think the Eurovision girl likes you," Kostyantyn said as he turned his back on her, certainly disturbed by the overwhelming feeling she had conveyed to him.

“Do you think so?”

They have been to the bar twice since that night; she hasn’t reappeared, so he not only thought it; Kostyantyn knew it. He couldn't do anything about it.

Although the pain was beating inside of him, with the same power of her voice singing Jamala's song and her gaze fixed on him.

Days later, between songs that played and sang together in the apartment, between walks in which they dedicated to tell each other what came up in the conversation, between talks that Kostyantyn gave him about science, astronomy, whatever, partly because of his innate passion for knowledge and partly because of wanting to dazzle him in untidy ways, Kostyantyn continued thinking of Nikita's words.

 _It was for you_.

"What song is that?" Mother asked him one night, while Kostyantyn played for her and for Citrus, who watched him from the surface of the piano.

It was 'A ya plyvu', an instrumental version that Kostyantyn tried to adjust to Nikita's voice, the one that still played in the centre of his memory; it was his need to understand why it was for him.

He explained to Mother who Irina was; later, he described Nikita's performance with great detail.

"He dedicated the song to you?"

"Yes…"

"You know the lyrics?"

"Yes."

Impossible not to know it already, after hearing it a thousand times in his head.

"Sing it to me."

He sang it feeling that it wasn’t his and never would be, although Mother congratulated him at the end.

"I notice you very inspired lately, sweetie."

He was it, yes.

"He dedicated you something very curious. Maybe you are thinking it very much for you, when in fact he's thinking it about himself and you. I mean… Is he telling you that he wants to get carried away and be free with you?"

It was that?

Gradually, if he analysed it, Nikita began to get carried away with him. While his shyness and reserve were innate, there was another kind of confidence in him, one deepened by the relaxation that always reigned in his face. There was when Nikita told him in detail different events about his life, about previous relationships, about his family, about his loneliness, that spectrum present in each stage, in each second.

It was when, without words, he lay down next to him on the bed to give everything while kissing him.

That part was the one that was becoming, encounter to encounter, in the most complex of all, because what at first were sweet kisses, modest, soft, pure, became fire.

How passionate Nikita is; discovering it dazzled him. He knew his passion through his voice, but intimacy was another matter, and the power of his passion was moving. He gave everything, he cared to understand what he liked, what kind of kisses, what kind of caresses, and Kostyantyn felt an impetus in him, a detail, a tenderness in spite of the sensuality, that in him was so different, more aesthetic, of another class, without mirages, honest and overwhelming, delicate.

No, it wasn't fire; it was water. The power of Nikita's passion was like an ocean crashing into his eyes, taking him away from everywhere, sinking him into the depths of the ocean that were his own emotions, at the most recondite point of his conceptual heart. How easily Nikita take him there, to his most sensitive feelings. It wasn’t about Nikita burning him.

Nikita dragged him.

And how hard it was for him to get carried away.

His relationship with Mélovin had always been tense: unfolding into two symbolic identities had made it easier for him to carry his _shadow_ condition with less prejudice; the label had allowed him not to judge in excess his nature, to feel part of the _shadows_ , although he always recognized himself different from them; the same as when he was human, the same strangeness in another kind of existence. But Mélovin had no right to appear when he was so attached to Nikita in the bed; if he let him appear, the result could be more painful than all the pain he has ever felt. He understands, he knows that Nikita too, but the limit has caused some uncomfortable moments in recent weeks.

He looks at Nikita, looks at him right now: he walks with gloved hands buried in the pockets of his coat, his head covered by a cap partially covered by snow, just like his shoulders. How adorable he looks, smiling, shy, fragile.

How different from when they are in the bed, together and alone.

Kostyantyn remembers a special occasion: almost two weeks ago, after walking two hours through Kiev, a Monday night in which the snow had taken a break, they had returned to the apartment just as they are doing now. Nikita, there, was telling him about his old fondness for tennis and football, which he had put aside for college. Later, he talked about acting lessons, singing lessons and, finally, piano and guitar lessons.

"I'm not good at playing instruments, but I know the basics."

Kostyantyn told him, on the other hand, how he had learned to play the piano in a self-taught way in childhood. Nikita looked at him with envy.

"Didn’t you take lessons? And you play like that?"

With the inflated ego, Kostyantyn laughed. Nikita accompanied him, both huddled in the bed.

"Do you think I play well?"

"I think you're talented, you seemed very good to me when I heard you."

"Only 'very good'?"

Nikita smiled at him: with his chest resting on one side of his body, he put his arms around his neck.

"You're… excellent."

Kostyantyn caressed his cheek. It was always funny how Nikita rejected him when he touched him because of the cold.

How cold Nikita is and what a calamity to be a _shadow_ in cases like that.

Getting used to the cold, Nikita sighed as he closed his eyes. He allowed himself to be caressed for endless minutes.

"Do you want me to play for you?"

Nikita opened his eyes. Touched, he nodded.

Kostyantyn approached Nikita's keyboard, a black Casio. He sat before it while Nikita plugged in the corresponding cables. When he finished, Kostyantyn saw him sit to his right on the bench that barely reached them both. When he noticed that on the keyboard there was a pile of untidy papers, laughing nervously, Nikita took them and held them on his lap. Kostyantyn wanted to ask him why he seemed so embarrassed all of a sudden, but he let him be.

For the moment.

He snapped his fingers, put them on the keyboard and, smiling as he felt the energy flow around him, played a song he was working on. The lyrics remain incomplete until today; nevertheless, when arriving at the chorus, he sang the only part that has finished with an indescribable emotion:

" _Raise your eyes to the sky, try to fly inside of your mind! Someone love, someone cry… Don't be shy, play this life_ …"

He continued playing feeling Nikita's gaze fixed on his fingers, almost swearing to see it transformed into brilliant, blinding energy. When he finished playing, he looked at him: Nikita was tearing.

He had noticed.

"That…" Nikita whispered.

"It's for you, yes… I composed it thinking of you.” Smiling with all the mischief he loved to express at such times, Kostyantyn narrowed his eyes. "You like it, Niki…?" he asked seductively.

With the eyes glistening from the crying contained, Nikita nodded once.

"And that song you sang at the bar, was…?"

Oh, 'Hooligan'.

"It's something I still can’t talk to you about. I'll explain it to you at some point, I promise."

After all, it had a lot to do with his vampiric nature.

Would it be time to tell him?

Nikita sighed; Kostyantyn noticed how hard he pressed the papers he kept on his lap.

It was time:

"And those papers? Are they yours?"

"I…" Blushed, Nikita pressed more the papers. "I-I'm not very good and…"

"Don’t you want to show me?"

"It's that you're a very good composer and I… I don't feel at your level."

"Nonsense: if you talk about your feelings, then they're wonderful songs, I don't need to listen to them to know!"

Nikita looked at him with demarcated shyness. After feinting twice, he picked up the papers and went page by page; he seemed to look for a special song. Kostyantyn read titles in half as he passed the pages. Until he stopped in one: it had no lyrics.

Curious that he didn't want to show him lyrics by him. Kostyantyn felt sorry, but he told himself that it was probably shame and that he had to be patient, nothing else.

When Nikita arranged the paper on the stand before the keyboard, Kostyantyn noticed how much he was trembling. He saw him raise his hands, put his fingers on the keys, and immediately noticed the problem.

"Hey, Niki…" Pushed by enthusiasm, Kostyantyn put his hands on Nikita's. He caressed them slowly, in soft touches, until Nikita had a powerful chill. "Relax your hands; you’re tense, and if you’re like this in excess, the sound expresses it. Go on: you are alone with me. Don't get so nervous."

Nikita coughed and pushed his hands away from the keyboard for a moment; the next one, with Kostyantyn's hands still on him, he took a breath and started to play.

Kostyantyn interrupted him as he ran his hands over him with an intense, cold caress.

"It has no lyrics, right?"

"Doesn’t have any…"

"But have you already thought how to sing it?"

Nikita looked at him out of the corner of his eye.

"Yes…"

Kostyantyn noticed him agitated: feeling that it was him who caused that alteration in Nikita, him with his presence, with his caresses and what they suggested, he smiled to himself, proud.

"Hum, please," Kostyantyn asked in a whisper.

He felt him tremble under his hands. Afterwards, he heard him sigh once more.

Finally, he played.

" _Nara nanana nara nana_ …" he hummed after the first notes, stifled, excited, overwhelmed.

Kostyantyn, without removing his hands from his, let him move over the keys without doing more than caressing.

What a… melancholic melody? Was melancholy what he felt? It was compelling, with such a sweet but vulnerable sensibility…

It was so worthy of Nikita.

He closed his eyes; he didn't need to see, just let the rest of his senses absorb the song, which Nikita hummed at times in whispers, in others with a soft voice, in others with a more powerful voice.

It was perfect.

Towards the end, he hummed a cappella; at the end of that part, he threw a wonderful note, so wonderful that Kostyantyn found himself sighing.

In the last part he listened with difficulty; Nikita was so stifled that his voice had barely left his throat.

And he finished.

They looked at each other just after that, turning their faces towards the other at the same time, with their hands still in the same place, on top of the keyboard.

Nikita was breathing hard, serious, worried. Soon, everything disappeared; he smiled softly.

He had understood: the song had enchanted him. And it had, yes. Kostyantyn smiled too, needing to confirm it.

When he did, Nikita's eyes shone almost as much as when he had finished playing his song. Kostyantyn felt all the wires of his consciousness fall apart.

Using his basic talent for telekinesis, one that all _shadow_ tamed at greater or lesser level, it took only a second to fulfil the most unconscious caprice: he moved Nikita and sat him astride him.

Nikita moaned for impression. Trembling, he hugged him by the shoulders; he tried, in vain, to breathe on his mouth. Kostyantyn suppressed the sigh that he needed to let go so he could listen in detail that sublime sound, Nikita without air, almost panting over him.

Trembling as much as Nikita, who in his arms looked like a red petal given to the plans of the wind, Kostyantyn caressed his back in an upward motion. He wanted to say something, but he couldn’t.

How to ruin perfection with words that could never describe their feelings?

Just before kissing him, Nikita did it; how he did it, with what passion, with what impetus, that Kostyantyn felt the kiss drag him to nothingness.

He didn't know when he stood up with Nikita on him, wrapping his legs around his waist; he also didn't know when he grabbed him from a thigh and from the back to walk around the apartment; he didn't know when he laid him on the bed to lie on him; he only knew that he was kissing him, devouring him, dying for him in every way, in every sense. He needed him so much, he craved him so voraciously, and it was all because of the emotions he transmitted to him, because of how much beauty his heart showed.

All the lights went away; they kissed with bodies entangled by the abruptness with which they had fallen together, they swayed against each other infected by the most erotic longing, they left sighs on the other's lips, equally suffocated.

Mélovin fixed Kostya's eyes on Nikita's neck: he needed that blood, he needed it more than any other. He couldn't stand it anymore.

Kostyantyn stopped by clenching a fist.

When he stops, Nikita usually looks at the ceiling with one hand on his chest, as if trying to calm down. That time, Kostyantyn noticed a subtle annoyance in his gesture.

"Will be like this forever…?”

The question hurt Kostyantyn: Nikita was beginning to realize the most complex detail of their relationship, the difference between the human and the _shadow_. With that question, he opened a crack between the two.

Or not: he only illuminated it. The crack was always there, whenever a kiss had no right to become more.

Nikita hugged him, sad. He stayed for the rest of the night like that, under him, hugging him by the waist.

“I’m sorry…” he said.

“Me too…” Kostyantyn answered.

He couldn't talk about turning him. He couldn't do it.

He didn't want to deny all those people who had applauded him so much the miracle that his voice meant.

In addition…

~~~

There’ll be some extra reports from the police, I will see them with Alva. If something urgent comes up, I'll ask you to come back as soon as possible.

~~~

He reads Artem's message while Nikita walks with him as relaxed as he looks lately, plunged into peace that ignore so many things assure.

"Did something happen?" he asks, still walking.

"It's about… that conflict in my community.”

The main reason why he still cannot consider turning him.

The conflict that cannot be at a worse time.

Resigned, after seeing how Nikita nods and he saves himself of ask him anything to preserve his privacy, Kostyantyn reviews the other side of the coin, how difficult that has been the research. Because every night, when Nikita fell asleep, he has marched to Dark Silence headquarters.

And he hasn’t found a clue. Any.

Artem and him share a talent, that’s to say a unique supernatural potential that every human has and which, when turned, _shadows_ can control consciously thanks to different kinds of training. Each talent of a _shadow_ is measured by the intensity that externalizes, expressed in eight levels. When the intensity is in the half, usually it’s in more than one talent; when the intensity is high, the other skills don’t pass a basic level, the first or second. Artem has at least four talents at half level, while Kostyantyn has one very high. 

The learning.

Learners, as they are called, have an inhumane facility to study absolutely everything without that cost them a bit, to accumulate information of all kinds; they are educated _shadows_ , those who speak dozens of languages, those which provide the best conversation. Studying hundreds of reports with that latent talent allowed them to analyse the behaviour of those monsters dressed in white during the last two years.

Their talent hasn’t served them that much.

Undoubtedly, on the other side, they have learners too, _shadows_ with enough knowledge to draw perfect plans, or that says the dearth of information that Kostyantyn and Artem have been able to come together, forty proofs between 10,000 police reports from different parts of the world.

They haven’t found anything after what happened to Borysko and the others. Neither their talent nor Alva and Rob being perceptives. They are the _shadows_ more capable of this kind of research, but they have been able to do almost nothing.

 _He_ has vanished from the face of the Earth, again, as the last thirty-two years.

"Maybe I should go in a while," he explains to Nikita. "Forgive me: I hope that, soon, I can stop having to do so."

And live in Odessa with him.

And make him happy either way, at any cost, in a shared and peaceful eternity adapted to what both decide to their relationship.

Nikita taps his arm; they are already near his apartment. Kostyantyn thinks about it, meanwhile: why they do what they do?

Why, with what kind of intentions?

Ten of the forty proofs that he has found with Artem about the existence of the organization to which _he_ belongs, all of them derived from police reports referring to murders and disappearances never resolved, reveal _him_ in different testimonies: young boy of pale skin, brown hair and dark eyes, not older than eighteen years, tall, thin and dressed in white clothes, delicate features, aesthetic.

It was _him_ , it had to be _him_ ; Kostyantyn knows that it’s _him_.

Because the crime scene of those ten cases were too similar to that of his own death: indoors, very young people, blood staining sheets.

As if he had left traces on purpose, as Mother and Hanna have theorized.

Why did _he_ kill humans and not use them to feed? Did _he_ bring the disappeared to wake up like _shadows_ elsewhere, as _he_ had done with him?

Why did _he_ kill Borysko and the others?

Too many questions, no proofs: he has reviewed every report that the police have given him since Borysko, he has searched to the smallest detail, witness statements, everything, but in vain. They have only been able to suppose: they don't want to be found, that's why they killed Borysko and the others, because they were perceptives, the most capable _shadows_ to find them thanks to their ability to read energetic movements, and without which a group of _shadows_ is more vulnerable. For that reason, they have forbidden Alva to leave the headquarters, because she’s a perceptive of the eighth level, too powerful to be considered, for them, as an obstacle in their plans.

But plans for what?

He doesn’t have time to keep thinking about it: Nikita and he arrive at the apartment and do what has become routine: Kostyantyn runs through the shadows of the outer wall of the building while Nikita enters through the door and takes the elevator. They see each other again under the threshold of the window that leads to the balcony.

They hug and, soon, they end up in bed. There, lying on their side and facing each other, they talk about the film, the performances, the cinematography.

“The dream of all the singers is that Wembley, is to be Freddie Mercury, a container of love that still continues to be filled.” Nikita speaks to him in whispers; Kostyantyn smiles as he notices how even his appearance has changed along with his mood; it shows in his eyes, in his mouth, in every corner.

Nikita is happy.

He's no longer that colourless being that Kostyantyn had seen in the bookstore when he returned to Ukraine; he has blossomed in the most resplendent rose, one that’s no longer rejected as in Wilde's tale; one that’s accepted, that’s treasured, and that's learning to value itself. "But that Wembley doesn't represent the same for everyone.”

Curious, although also moved for notice Nikita so well, Kostyantyn inquires:

"It doesn't?"

Nikita denies, laughing.

“No. Wembley doesn't have to be a stadium; the stadium may even be a lost bed in an old Kiev building…”

From seduction, Kostyantyn passes to the tenderness: it’s one of the most beautiful things that he has heard from Nikita, it is by the powerful meaning that is tied to the concept.

They hold hands, looking at each other. How wonderful this shared loneliness, this destiny that has emerged after the loss of all hope. This meeting of one with the other at the right time, for more differences and difficulties.

It’s mere perfection, because it's love, and it's mutual, and it's true.

At last, true.

“I put lyrics to the song that I hummed the other day.”

“Really?”

“Yeah…” Nikita smiles; shame comes out through his pores, but also happiness. He still needs to be confident, but all these talks, songs, walks and feelings, even intimacy, perhaps, have been helpful.

It's not enough yet, but he advances.

“Can I…?” Nikita whispers, but Kostyantyn's ringtone interrupts them.

Hating the other side of the coin of his life, Kostyantyn gets up and steps away from the bed to answer.

“We need you!” Artem shouts, hysterical. “It was _him_! And we lost contact with the residences of five very powerful and ancient _shadows_ of Kiev! I'll go to investigate with Mother and Jandiara! Please, check the report!”

Kostyantyn looks at Nikita, approaches him, takes his hand, squeezes it.

“Okay…” he sputters for Artem, wounded.

It's not fair.

He kisses Nikita's hand and gets lost in his eyes: nothing wants more than to listen to him. Nothing hurts more than having to abandon him just right now.

“Go, don’t worry."

"But Niki…”

This one gets up. He hugs him, separates from him and looks into his eyes with unbearable charm.

“It will be later, Kostya. Don’t worry…”

 _Kostya_ …

Kostyantyn kisses him, and refuses to leave his lips, and remembers that he must fight for the future of what they have, and he leaves at full speed containing the violent emotion that seizes him.

Then has reappeared? Has _he_ reappeared?

When he arrives at the National Art Museum of Ukraine, when he goes down to the bowels of the Dark Silence headquarters, in the room that he shares with Artem, he meets Alva, who passes pages of the report with sad gesture, sitting before a rustic wooden desk, between electric candles.

“Mélovin,” she says gently to welcome him, "this is the report, they found her body close to here today in the morning, in the apartment where she had just moved out…”

Alva gets up from the desk and gives the seat to Kostyantyn, who returns the pages that she has read to the first. The photo that he sees hooked with a clip at the beginning makes him utter a choked cry.

He covers his mouth with a trembling hand, in shock.

Alva, holding his shoulders, asks what's wrong.

Nastunye Vólkova, twenty-three years. She worked as a secretary, she studied singing in an institute.

The girl from the bar, the Eurovision girl.

He turns the page: murdered in her own bed, with no traces of bites, her chest pierced by a big sharp-bladed weapon, like an axe, but also thin; the blade of the weapon, as well as in Borysko, must have been very thin.

Her beautiful face in the photos, of such a delicate girl, disfigured by death a few pages later.

And he grieved like a child for believing her attracted to Nikita…

“I met her in a bar with an open mic that I've been going to since we came here; she always sang Eurovision songs,” he explains to Alva before sinking into silence.

It doesn't take more than a few minutes to read all the pages, to memorize and analyse all the information. The juiciest thing is at the end: a security camera of the building had registered a whitish figure hidden in the dark, near the main door.

Seeing the height and physical appearance in the photos is enough: he knows it, he knows that’s _him_.

He clenches his fists, furious.

“I can’t understand the pattern…” he murmurs, desperate. Alva kneels next to him and looks at him carefully. “They have killed and disappeared young people between 18 and 27 years old. But why do they kill them? For what? And what makes them choose them? What do they have that others don’t?”

"Maybe, the answer is in that girl: you met her, and this has never happened to you.” Alva fills his eyes with her angelic face, which is mired in deep concern. “Was something in her that caught your attention? Did you notice something that differentiated her from the rest?”

That she sang well, that she was sweet, that she was nervous but always passionate about the versions she interpreted of Eurovision’s songs, that she smiled in a special way at Nikita, that ‘1944’ had been her best performance since he had known her.

And that…

“She looked at me with hatred the last time, she did it for something that I can’t tell you; I felt her looking at me, I turned around and she was full of hatred.”

“So, you perceived her without looking at her.”

"Yes: her energy, for a moment, covered all the other energies at the bar; it was like a wave covering everything."

A wave…

“Mélovin…”

A wave, covering everything…

“Mélovin, that sounds like…”

A wave of breath-taking intensity covering all the energy around it…

“What you’re describing isn’t common in a human, Mélovin, because they aren’t like us nor have the enhanced talent thanks to being _shadows_ ; an energy so strong that it can be felt in such intensity can be the energy of humans with perceptive potential who have no idea of how to control their own potential.”

A wave, an immense wave, powerful, capable of dragging everything…

He looks at Alva, dizzy: it's impossible to confirm it, but…

"Are they looking for potential perceptives? Is that what you say, Alva?"

She nods.

“Perhaps, our assumptions about Borysko and the others and why they were killed are wrong. We have very little information, I'm just assuming… I mean… Perceptive _shadows_ have the power to feel, read, use and hide all the energy, their own and that what revolves around them. We feel _everything_ , even the smallest movement, which makes our initial training very difficult when we are turned, since it’s unbearable not knowing how to control it. Humans who externalizes their energy a lot could be a potential perceptive, as well as a learner, persuasive and others can be it by denoting a certain characteristic. If you felt her explode in that way, maybe that's why.”

Then…

A wave in the middle of the ocean, sinking him into his own conceptual heart…

“No…” he sighs. A lump form in his throat. "Alva, and the other way around?”

“What do you mean?”

“If a human has nightmares, feels observed, has chills and notices the presence of a _shadow_ …”

“Potentially perceptive, without doubts: I felt Jandiara from the first second when she offered me the _gift_. And we talk about a potential like the one I had, at a high level: humans aren’t ready to perceive us, they aren’t trained, and to perceive our different energy is awesome to them, chilling; it was for me. It’s not convenient to get too close to them: we can scare them a lot. Nightmares are very traumatizing for this class of humans; I had them, and they were of an indescribable intensity.”

Kostyantyn stands up with such violence that the chair he was sitting on falls behind him.

Nikita has perceptive potential.

But of course. It was always evident, in every braking in the corner, in every search he made in his surroundings when he followed him from the shadows to his apartment, in how he found him in his hiding place after meeting him.

He always perceived him.

It wasn't because of his fears as Nikita had supposed; the nightmares and the chills, as well as that sensation of vertigo before him that he has described, they were for his talent to perceive the energy around him.

Which means that Nikita, maybe…

“Alva, I have to go. I'll be back as soon as possible, I swear, but I need… I need to make sure about something…”

“But Mélovin…!”

The calm with which he tried to speak to her explodes in an unequalled anguish. Kostyantyn, suffocated by uncertainty, runs out by turning off all the lights around him in order to boost his speed in the shadows. Alva calls him, worried, but nothing stops him.

Artem is going to hate him forever.

But he doesn't care: if they look for perceptives, if they eliminate them for some reason or they are recruited…

Everything is so clear now, damn!

If Nikita felt those things being away from him it was because other _shadows_ were following him! Other _shadows_!

 _Him_!

“He’s in danger…” he whispers running at full speed, jumping from roof to roof, from wall to wall, under the snow and without the ability to brake before anything or anyone.

When he reaches Nikita's building, standing on the roof, he doesn’t feel his energy, he doesn’t perceive it. He holds his own chest.

“No…”

When he gets ready to go down, terrified of just imagining the scenario he will find, all the lights around him turn off at once, all, all in a radius of at least fifteen streets. Surrounded by nothing but darkness, Kostyantyn feels unable to bear it.

But he doesn’t perceive Nikita's energy nor that of anyone else…

Crying for the terror that tears his skin, he jumps to Nikita's balcony.

The window is open.

Nikita is a cold person, it's not possible that he…

He passes by, and his heart skips a beat when he hears him breathe in the darkness.

“Nikita…?” he inquires, destroyed. He breathes weakly, as if…

“Kostya…” a voice responds.

 _His_ , not Nikita's.

 _His_ , thirty-two years later, intact as he remembers it; a voice that, in a second, is capable of transporting him in time.

The voice that, once, was the most important thing for him.

His everything.

The light of the night table blinks and lights, only that: before Kostyantyn, Nikita has a bite in the neck; he looks weak, but he resists, and he’s caught to a thin arm that surrounds his neck, while a delicate hand points him with a strange weapon that, by colour, it looks like bronze. It’s like a kind of spatula that ends in a point, with a wide and extremely thin blade, almost surgical, triangular in shape.

And who holds Nikita against his body, moved, with his mouth stained by the ingested blood, cries.

Cries the same blood that Kostyantyn himself is crying.

“Kristian…” Kostyantyn whispers, and how strange it’s to say his name for the first time in years, to do so, looking into his eyes without feeling that his chest explodes with joy at the simple act of invoking him.

Soon, he understands everything: the lost contact with the other _shadows_ it was a distractor; the murder of the Eurovision girl was the bait.

And here he is, Kostyantyn, inside the trap that Kristian, knowing his talent, has planned for him.

He tries to light more lights, but his skills don’t allow it. That can only mean one thing: someone is blocking all the energy around them, making it inaccessible.

And it's Kristian who has the power to do it.

And how obvious it is suddenly, in the face of the evidence that he has struggled so hard to find, that Kristian is a perceptive too, an extremely powerful, eighth-level.

“My love, you’re beautiful with black hair…” he says, and in the broken voice Kostyantyn remembers a thousand details, from the sweetest to the most intimate, from the easiest to the most difficult. “I missed you so much, I thought I was going crazy… But don’t worry! We'll be fine, because you’ll know the truth, because you’ll understand that Mother lies to you, that she has lied to everyone with the sole purpose of turning the _shadows_ into a farce, to get away from our true purpose.”

Kristian cries more, gasps with emotion. And Kostyantyn hates him so much, so much, and how moved he looks, and how much he believes in his emotion, because it’s the same that he feels under the hatred that burns his heart.

“Let him go…” Kostyantyn asks in a thin voice, looking into Nikita's eyes, who swings the eyes between the weapon and him, weak, terrified, with a horrendous bite in the neck.

Even Mélovin is furious about it.

“I can’t, Kostya: I need Nikita.” Kristian says, always moved, and caresses Nikita's chest as he trembles with fear and incomprehension. “It's too hard for us to find humans with this extraordinary talent; we need him, and he needs us.”

“For what?”

“To fulfil our true mission, the one for which _shadows_ were created centuries ago: to save humanity from the greatest evil.”

“What evil…?”

“The lie that blinds humanity, that plunges it into incomprehension, that distances it from the truth.”

What is he saying…?

He doesn’t distrust Mother for a single moment, not considering how deranged Kristian sounds immersed in such diffuse and generic ideas; all he cares about is taking Nikita out of there, and taking him to the _network_ , and saving him, and having him with him in a peaceful reality that, now, sounds like the most impossible of dreams.

“Give me Nikita, Kristian,” Kostyantyn asks when extending a hand that trembles in excess. “Please, do it. He has nothing to do with us, with the _shadows_ and with that greater evil of which you speak…”

Kristian shakes his head.

“That's what you think, Kostya: he has _too much_ to do. But I insist: don’t worry. You'll be fine, Nikita too, and we can be of help, the three of us, together with our brothers. I promise you that I’ll not meddle if you don’t want to, I respect that you have forgotten about me, but… Kostya, I just put together this ambush to tell you!”

“To tell me what?”

“To tell you that I can save both of you. I can, Kostya, but you have to listen to me first!” Kristian cries more, all the tears fall at once, and his face is already redder than white because of blood: he’s convinced that he’s telling the truth. "I just want that, that you open your eyes, that you're safe! Please, Kostya…” Kristian turns Nikita with telekinesis and presses his face to his chest while holding him gently by the hair. "I just want to save you…!”

The scream resounds throughout the room. There’s so much passion in it, so much, so identical to the passion that has always been in Kristian’s voice and feelings, that Kostyantyn, beyond himself, too distressed to reason, hesitates for the first time.

What if…?

"I hear you," he accepts, defeated.

Because he only wants one thing, one thing in the whole Earth: save Nikita.

Reach that ideal dream life, that of the snow, Ukraine, Nikita and peace.

Reach it and stay there, with him, forever.

Stay there forever and don't worry about anything else.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading and I hope you like it. <3
> 
> When I write, I usually visualize a story as a line with several checkpoints. The checkpoint that comes soon is the most important of all. I know that my English isn't good and that sometimes I get too excited (in vain) about writing certain scenes, but I'm enjoying this and it gives me an infinite joy to share it with someone. 
> 
> Thank you very much for letting me do it. 
> 
> About Kristian, of course you remember him from ESC 2017, right? That charming angel who represented Bulgaria with his beautiful mess that it wasn't a mess at all…
> 
> Why I chose him?
> 
> Simple: I love him. And I needed a character with that angelic vibes that I feel in Nikita too; this detail was the most required. And I saw a conversation between Mél and him and I loved them. So…
> 
> Kristian is the bad guy. But is as bad as he seems? We will find out soon. :')
> 
> I hope to make him a complex character. I will try.
> 
> In next chapters, I will use some ESC people in little roles that I need in the background. I'm sure about two of them (one of this was a constant question between readers in Tumblr, thanks for asking about him, because he's my one true king) and I'm thinking about using others too. I don't know. This details are pure fanservice for myself, so... XD
> 
> The other one is one of my ESC girlfriends (?). And she was robbed, ok? Like all Belarusian artists on ESC. 
> 
> Oops. XD
> 
> Jadoremelekseev, Di, Memi, Kostya Anon and people on Tumblr: just thank you, ok? Thank you with my heart and my soul. I know that my English it's a mess and I can't thank you enough for reading despite of that. And thank you Blake for reading my (I hope) better version, the Spanish one. :')
> 
> I put all my effort in each chapter. Thanks for give it a chance to my crazy stuff. 
> 
> See you in the next chapter! Thanks! ♥
> 
> (ahhh, and I know that this chapter was enterely about Mél; the next one has another point of view XD)


	13. XII

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nikita has a song, a feeling and a decision in his heart. But he needs to defeat the fog first.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Forgive all my mistakes, please: I gave all my best. 
> 
> Thanks for reading... ♥

**XII**

The last kiss left him dizzy; what pressure Kostyantyn exerted on him, although not in a violent or inconsiderate way; it was impetus, vehemence, one related to intense emotions, not with mere negativity, with toxicity, with cruelty disguised as love.

He touches his mouth to remember it one more time; it's getting harder and harder to see him leave.

He walks to the keyboard ready to practice: when he finally can play the song for him, nothing else wants to sound perfect, as perfect as he had felt it when writing the song, even when it had been deflated so quickly because of himself. It’s still hard for him not to be so mean with his own songs. He has a lot to learn.

But Kostyantyn, ah! With what shameless power inspires him with his talent, with his songs, with the sound that only he can intone in that way on the keys, because nothing is more beautiful of him than his way of feeling the world.

Nothing is more beautiful than those eyes, unequal, imperfect, human, although vampiric, are those who look at him.

He arranges the sheets on the stand and tries to remember what Kostyantyn said: that he plays relaxed, that he doesn’t transmit to the sound his nervousness. He knows he's a fool to put himself like this for a simple silly song played with a cheap keyboard and whose Russian lyrics are the worst he's written in life, but it means so much for him, he cares so much for it, he has given it so much meaning, that feeling this way is inevitable.

How can he not get nervous, if he cares?

Even if it's a silly song, although nobody will ever care, in it he has encapsulated everything that he feels for him. Enough reason to consider it the most important song of all, the most real feeling encapsulated, the way in the opposite direction to the most unbearable loneliness.

But if he doesn’t agree, if he doesn’t feel it…

Feeling pathetic, he contains the emotion that tries to escape from his eyes in form of tears; what an imbecile, what a failure to get excited like this for a silly song that nobody will care about, for feeling naked for the simple fact of playing it alone in his apartment, but he’s trying to learn, and to do it, he must play, sing, express himself and let himself go, don’t shut up, don’t give up.

That hasn’t helped him, more than to enlarge the loneliness.

His must value his own feelings.

He must stop feeling that his creations are crap that nothing but contempt deserve.

He wipes a tear and smiles: it's for Kostyantyn and for himself, it's for both of them and no one has to understand it, feel it or admire it. Nobody but them.

That Wembley that are both.

For that, he plays.

He sings with tears balancing on the edge of his eyelids, out of tune with emotion and tremor, missing the keys; he sings and plays with a huge emotion that pierces the walls, the ceiling, Kiev and the whole world, because his song only speaks about one thing, it only represents the prayer with which anyone can identify, because it's a distinctly human, universal feeling.

He doesn’t want to be alone anymore.

He doesn’t want that anything nor nobody separates him from Kostyantyn.

Never. Never at all.

He loves him, he does it too much; he can no longer tolerate the idea, the possibility that what they have it ends. Maybe, for other people, that it might seem silly, childish, unreasonable, exaggerated, whatever, more considering the differences that tarnish all similarities. But it means so much to him!

So much, damn it; so much, more than what it has the right to mean.

He doesn’t know if it's a mistake, if it’s right or wrong, but he loves him. He loves him! Because each moment they have shared, each conversation, walk, date, or the simple fact of being with him in the bed looking at him in the eyes has plunged him into a teenage feeling that, in turn, has brought out the stupidity that he has on the inside, that side that always provokes the end, which makes people move away from him.

He has always been the worst to fall in love. He has never known how to do it. He’s useless for this.

How silly he feels for love him so much, for love so easy and so fast, so strong and so intensely, in a way that tears him apart, that shakes him and fills him and burns him as in the most immense pyre of fire, but it’s about the peace that that gaze transmits to him, how much it has helped him to value himself to be reflected in those eyes. Because Kostyantyn has helped, and a lot, but what he has done the most is to help him see himself through his eyes; he has given him another perspective of what he himself is, what his feelings mean, what his heart screams.

Because it's about that, yes: Kostyantyn isn’t only a mouth that kisses him, a feeling that gives him warmth, hands that touch him, ears that listen to him; Kostyantyn are eyes that look at him, that reflect him and that make him see not only what Kostyantyn has inside, but what he himself has.

His feelings, even though he feels them like that when he sees himself, aren’t stupid.

His feelings are worth as much as those of others.

He sings and plays without understanding what he's doing; is the conflict that he has in his community a serious matter? He's in danger? He was so serious when he left; maybe, things are getting harder and harder for him.

What right does he have to yearn for so much while Kostyantyn is involved in such a great conflict?

Isn’t he being an obstacle?

But his feelings…

In the end, he covers his face with his hands. How much it costs to value what he feels, how counterproductive to feel that he needs Kostyantyn so much, but he has opened his eyes in such a way that…

And a chill run through him.

And all the lights go off at once.

And some teeth it stuck in his neck.

An arm holds him against a body while cold lips suck his skin erotically. He groans for the pain, aware of how the tears fall as fright begs, feeling like a powerful energy, as heavy as a thousand iron walls, sinks him into himself.

"Kostya will love you more than he already loves you when he listens to you: your song is beautiful, Nikita Alekseev," says against the bloodied skin of his neck a voice that seems familiar, that seems too familiar, but that he doesn’t know from where or when.

He tries to talk, but he's dizzy, weak; this is how it feels a vampire bite? So intense, as if a vacuum sucked your energy? As if all your vitality was drained in a second? It’s awful.

It is in the arms of the wrong concept.

When a light comes on, he tries to visualize what’s going on around him: he's so weak that he cannot react at all to the strange bronze dagger that points at him, neither when he discovers why that voice seemed so familiar.

The boy who he had crossed in the street, the one who had sung 'Cry me a river’, with his face stained by the blood that he has stolen in conjunction with the one that he cries.

He’s a vampire too, discovers.

"Kostya…" he listens the boy. How happy he feels him, how easily he captures his joy despite the disturbing image that provides and the weakness that doesn’t allow him to stand up for himself, given against his will to the wrong arms.

"Kristian…" Kostyantyn answers.

He looks at him: Kostyantyn cries too, he does so while clenching his fists; he’s furious as he has never seen him before.

He listens how they talk about things that he doesn’t understand, the greater evil, blinded humanity, a certain Mother who lies to vampires, or _shadows_ , or whatever they’re called. He doesn’t understand nothing of what they say, absolutely nothing; he's only able to look at Kostyantyn, weaker than scared, more worry about him than about himself.

He only manages to understand that they know each other, that both are vampires and that the boy, Kristian, is as excited as he would be by Kostyantyn.

That he loves him.

Perhaps…? He cannot analyse the situation, because Kristian turns him around in the same way that Kostyantyn has done at some passionate moment, without using the hands, using the mind. He remembers that there are vampires that dominate telekinesis in books and that Kostyantyn assured that a lot of vampiric literature tells the truth. That would make a lot of sense now, when he feels how Kristian caresses him with his cold hand.

What other things said by the literature are true?

"I hear you," Kostyantyn says.

Then, Kristian speaks without stopping to caress his hair, the hair of a Nikita that hardly manages to reason:

"Mother lied. She was there when the _shadows_ were born before the eyes of the world with the mission to change it, to transform it, yes, but she lied to everyone when she said it was in the 16th century, when…"

16th century? How long have they existed? That was before Polidori, Le Fanu, Stoker.

But why does he feel as if an invisible force crushes him? Why the only thing that he can perceive in the air is that Kristian loves Kostyantyn passionately?

"Cannot we get Nikita out of here?! He has nothing to do with this, Kristian, please… If we say so much to him, we will put him in danger…!" How hurt sounds Kostyantyn's voice suddenly, how hurt by the circumstances.

Nikita wants to hug him, wants to do it immediately, and let him cry quietly, and tell him that although he has no idea how to be of help, that even if he doesn’t understand anything of what's happening, he will do everything possible to be useful.

For making him smile and that nothing will ever hurt him again.

"He’ll not be in danger: he'll be safe when you let me explain to you. Even though I hate him for how much you love him, I’ll not hurt him… I couldn’t, not with a brother!"

Does Kostyantyn love him too?

… Why that energy crushes him like this?

"Kristian, stop!" Kostyantyn screams, wrathful. "I'll not let you do again what you did to me!" He breathes agitated, desperate. "I’LL NOT ALLOW YOU TO DO THAT!”

"My love, you don’t understand…"

"You forced me to become _this_!"

He…?

So, Kristian is that vampire who hurt him so much, who disappointed him…?

But how was he able to hurt him like that, if he loves him with this force that is capable of crushing everything around him…?

"I know I did wrong, I know I failed you, but you don’t understand! I didn’t have bad intentions, I just wanted to help you! I wanted to get us safe! I paid for the mistake I made with you, I keep paying for it… but…"

"It doesn’t help me: you were everything that mattered to me, and you didn’t mind ruining it by letting yourself be convinced by anyone, to let you become a _shadow_ , to stop being you to be this that you are now, a murderer of innocent people, of _shadows_ , of people who…!”

"It's part of my punishment! I do everything _she_ asks me because…"

" _She_?"

" _She_ , our leader."

"Who is _she_?"

"Mother knows."

"What…?"

"Ask to her who forced who. I'll let you ask before we kill her."

"NO!"

Who is Mother?

Why did Kostyantyn's scream sound like a cry of pure and twisted despair?

"Kostya, she's a lie. You’re blind."

“Who is Mother…?" Nikita whispers against Kristian's chest, the one against which a hand holds him while caressing his hair one time, and another, and again. He only wants to protect Kostyantyn; to protect him, he feels that he needs to know, that he should.

Doesn’t lose track of what they say and be able to help, help Kostyantyn to…

"A lair, Nikita," Kristian responds with a relentless tenderness, as a child talking to another child. "She cheated Kostya, put ideas in his head and stole him as if he were an object and not a person."

"Kristian, shut up."

"I'm just telling the truth."

"Don't talk like that about _mama_! She’s not capable! You don’t even know her!”

"Do you know her real name?"

Silence.

"Do you know her year of birth?"

Silence.

"Do you know why she was the first _shadow_?"

Silence.

"Do you know her, Kostya?"

"Kristian, please…"

"It was in the 11th century, not in the 16th; it was in a monastery southwest of what's Germany now, not in a convent south of what is Italy. It was a sacrifice and Mother surrendered at will, not a failed experiment by a scientist with primitive methods involving energy. And Mother wasn't forced, _she_ was! _She_ was dragged by Mother to something that _she_ didn't want, because it’s a lie that Mother has five talents in the middle level; she, your _mama_ , es an eighth-level persuasive, as you call them, the most dangerous kind of _shadow_ that all _shadow_ communities it strictly forbids to create, a persuasive demon that’s washing everyone's head. A farce!”

Silence, and silence, and silence.

Nikita gasps in pain; the weight that falls on him is unbearable.

"Let me go, please…" he pleads without a voice. His neck, his soul and everything he has hurts.

It hurts to hear Kostyantyn sobbing with sadness and not being able to comfort him.

Kristian hugs him.

"I can't let you go, Nikita. _She_ saw you and _she_ guided me to you, _she_ did it because you’re one of us."

"And what means to be one of you…?" Nikita asks, desperate, for the energy, and the sobs, and all.

He just wants to sing his song.

He just wants to lie down in bed with Kostyantyn and stay with him forever.

He just wants to eradicate all the sadness from his heart.

"It's being angels," Kristian whispers with an extreme emotion in the voice, so much, but so much, that it's contagious, and Nikita swears that his skin bristles just by listening.

He turns his face towards Kostyantyn without taking off from Kristian's chest: he looks at him with an anguish as powerful as the energy that crushes him.

"Angels…?" Nikita asks looking directly at Kostyantyn, who because of the dizziness sometimes seems to be on his head, others on his side, that is distorted so much that it hurts in his soul not being able to focus him.

As if he lost the ability to access to him; all his nightmares united in a single feeling.

"Angels, the angels that Mother was entrusted to gather, but that she so emphatically rejected in order to fulfil her own plans. It was the priest's fault: he believed that she was the right one, everyone believed her, even my leader. But, you know, Nikita: the potential persuasives, those humans that you call psychopaths, narcissists, are just beings who steal eyes to camouflage themselves among normal people. Mother deceived them all by stealing everything from _her_ , from my leader, but _she_ 's a fair perceptive; she agreed to be the one to reunite us."

Nikita sees how Kostyantyn covers his mouth with one hand. However, sees how he frowns and clenches his fists at once, as if, suddenly, he had discovered something.

"Did _she_ turn you into a _shadow_?" Kostyantyn inquires. Suddenly, in a subtle gesture, it's as if a calm reign over him.

"Yes," Kristian replies.

"Why?”

"Because _she_ showed me that _she_ was telling the truth by making me understand what kind of talent I had and how I could use it, because _she_ explained to me why we exist, why we born with this potential as humans and why is our destiny to become _shadows_. The problem was that I didn't want to go with _her_ without you, that's why I turned you into a _shadow_ too. But _she_ told me that you weren’t someone who should receive this gift."

"Because I'm not a perceptive."

"Because you aren’t an angel, 'perceptive' is the empty concept you use to describe the indescribable. And you look like it: all the potential learners, as they’re called, are confusing, that's why we check each candidate to the point of exhaustion."

"And you kill them to erase evidence…"

"You have talent, my love. Exactly."

Kostyantyn fakes a smile that dizzies Nikita. He’s faking it for real?

"Telling me all this is telling _mama_ and I know you know. Why are you telling me this, Kristian?”

"Because I’ll not let you get robbed this time. I paid to betray them that time, but they gave me another opportunity for my talent: I’m one of the three most powerful."

"Of how many?"

"Hundreds."

"That explains why there are so few perceptive members of Dark Silence in Europe…"

"We have members from all continents. But yes: Europeans are the majority. It's complicated to travel outside Europe for us, you know, without government help. Even so, we have almost one hundred years of existence; after so much effort, we can finally fight against all those who represent a brake on our divine mission."

Nikita feels lost again; the energy that crushes him doesn’t allow him to reason anything he hears. He listens to them talk about talents, about levels, about Mother's contacts, about…

"Let me go, please… I'm exhausted," Nikita says when he feels that, due to the force that crushes him, he will lose consciousness at any moment.

"What do you feel?" Kristian asks.

"That something that I cannot see… it crushes my bones."

"I'm been excessive with you, but I have no choice; you’re _very_ strong, Nikita, and keeping you suspended is hard even for me.” Nikita notices that Kostyantyn frowns when Kristian says the last. “Help me convince Kostya, please… The gift you have is beautiful! We aren’t born in vain with this gift; we have it for a reason! The _shadow_ 's gift was only intended for people like us, because our ability allows us to do a lot of good, help many human beings… Isn't that great?"

"Is it to say that Nikita is forced to go with you only because it's a high-level potential perceptive?”

Nikita laughs despite all the weakness that annuls him; he cannot agree more with that question.

"Exactly: I don’t decide these things; the energy decides, which chooses the recipients of the most outstanding talent of all: to feel how the world works; to know, by feeling, how to make it a better place. Nikita has a duty as I do; his potential is one of the most exceptional I've seen. If we train him, he’ll be one of the strongest, as I am. Maybe, he even be stronger than me."

Kostyantyn smiles; he’s looking at Nikita in the eyes.

Maybe…?

"It seems I have a fetish with perceptives, then. I will call it _percephilia_. What do you think, Kristian?"

Nikita wants to laugh, but weakness doesn't let him. Soon it’s clear what has been said during these desperate minutes: Kostyantyn and Kristian had something once, when they were human, in that distant Soviet Union of the eighties. He doesn't feel bad or jealous about it, but energy doesn't allow him too much either; he’s so exhausted that nothing craves more than to faint.

Up to that point it’s crushing him that energy that he feels, that he doesn't see, that it doesn't stop crushing him.

The love that Kristian feels covering everything that exists around him.

Soon, he understands something else, he does it when Kostyantyn’s image starts spinning around the room, given his exhaustion: Why did he stop asking Kristian to release him? Seeing the confidence that Kostyantyn transpires before him, Nikita realizes that this attitude isn't casual, that Kostyantyn doesn't behave like this when the emotion passes through him, but when he has the situation coldly calculated, as when he blinked the lights before him to confirm his different nature, that time before kissing him for the first time on that dark terrace. That's the gesture he has now.

He plans something.

He smiles with the little strength he manages to tame; Kostyantyn, seeing him, seems more confident than before.

"I really missed your sense of humour,” Kristian says, smiling. "If you agree to come with me, I'll let you turn Nikita into one of us. You can do it yourself and you can follow all the rituals that you want! You can train him, in everything except what concerns our mission. And you’ll be welcome: we have expanded our pretensions, and we are aware of the importance of _shadows_ with talents like yours to success."

Turn him into a _shadow_? Rituals? Training? Talent? Nikita is startled by a fierce anxiety. Every time, he understands less; every time, he sees Kostyantyn more diffuse.

He feels more and more Kristian’s love, so powerful that it’s as if it pierced his skin.

"No," Kostyantyn says, "that will not be necessary."

"Don’t you want to be his _shadow_ -progenitor?"

"It's not about that, it's about that I don’t want to go with you and I'm not going to let you take him."

Nikita contains a laugh; yes, he has everything planned.

How easy it’s, suddenly, after so many shared moments, to read Kostyantyn as an open book.

"I mean, Kris…" For the first time, Kostyantyn advances towards them, he does so by walking the two meters that separate him from them. Nikita, When Kostyantyn takes the first step, feels how the energy crushes him with more power. Or not?

Or was it before, with that simple _Kris_ pronounced in such a sweet tone?

Kristian stops caressing his hair. Nikita, surreptitiously, observes him: he’s serious, moved rather, and contains red tears.

"But…" he whispers, and how genuine is the pain that comes from his voice.

"Kris," Kostyantyn repeats when he reaches them. Nikita squeezes his eyelids when he feels one of his cold hands on his back in a rising caress that he already knows how to recognize, "When I met you, you were the most talented boy in the music school we went to. You ate the world; we all knew you were the one with the most future. And not only that: you were full of ideals, noble feelings, empathy. You were ahead of your time; you were different from everyone and your voice was simply perfect."

The energy that crushes Nikita wanes a bit. Whatever Kostyantyn is doing, it's working.

Something in Kristian, by his words, gradually weakens.

Kostyantyn smiles at Kristian as he always smiles at Nikita, with that adolescent mischief, with that overwhelming vitality and charisma.

"You were younger than the rest, but you looked like a professional; you were. And you opened my mind when I was filled with fear; you took away all the prejudices, that so typical of that era and that context. You taught me a lot, as a person and as an artist, and you always seemed to me the most special person, the brightest, the best. You didn't want to make music; you wanted to change the world. You had the right hunger and it was touching."

The energy continues to fall; to his surprise, Nikita realizes that he can move, that he no longer feels weak; that, in spite of the bite that he has in the neck and what it symbolizes, he feels the same as when he was practicing before the keyboard, full of energy.

Free to tame his own energy.

Is that Kristian’s talent, the one who makes him an ‘angel’? Is the talent to be able to annul other energies?

Is that his potential talent, the one that makes him a chosen one under his strange criteria?

"You were one of those who thought that something had to be done, that we couldn’t take anything for granted," Kostyantyn continues in a breath-taking tone, for the sweet, for the honest, "that we couldn't sit and wait for the world to change; you wanted to give a message, that was your interest in music: to see us in the fog, that whoever listens to you never felt loneliness. And then you changed the discourse, and you started talking about dispelling the fog, and now you became this, in this being that ensures the opposite of what he always assured, that we must take everything for granted, that we must obey the order of a something or someone superior to be what we must, not what we want. So, Kristian…"

The energy goes down almost completely; Kristian no longer holds the tears, but cries them, and his hands fall on both sides of his body.

Kostyantyn is winning.

"My question is… What happened? What did they do to you? How weak were you because of your family's rejection of you and me, that you let yourself be convinced by a persuasive? Because my _mama_ (Niki: you’ll love her; she already loves you without even knowing you and I can’t wait for you to meet her. I can't!) maybe is crazy, but I assure you that she's not a persuasive nor as the one you describe. I’m very curious to know who spoke so badly of her to you, I would like to understand, but I’ll not stop there; I’ll stop in you. What the hell did they do to you? How can you talk like this, as if you weren’t you? How can you wish that a person who’s like you were once, sensitive and full of nobility, becomes something that doesn’t interest him just because you tell him that's his divine mission? What are you thinking about?"

The energy disappears; Kristian's tears fall one by one, slip through the smooth white skin and deathly paint the impeccable white suit. Soon, he’s no longer that imposing boy of overwhelming ideals; he's the sweetest child.

"Who are you, Kris? What did you do with that wonderful human, the one that you used to be?"

"Kostya…" murmurs this one, sobbing. "I just wanted them to stop judging me, to accept what I had with you… I escaped from home for that…"

"And _she_ appeared."

" _She_ found me crying in a bar that was in the corner of my house."

"I remember it, where we used to meet every Sunday to talk about music…"

Kristian's face shrinks with emotion. That Kostyantyn remembers that, that simple detail, seems to destroy his heart.

" _She_ came and started talking to me. Then I crossed _her_ in other situations, and _she_ kept talking to me, and when I collapsed with hatred _she_ offered me the gift."

"And you came for me…"

"Yes…"

"And who’s _she_?"

"Kostya, no…"

Kristian pushes Nikita aside; Nikita falls face down on the ground. He sits instantly, to prove to Kostyantyn that he’s okay, to not to worry about him.

To let him keep doing what he's doing, whatever it is.

He observes them from the ground, sitting just in front of the library: separated by a few centimetres, practically of the same height, Kristian and Kostyantyn share a deep, intense look.

Yes: everything is true. Once, between those two gazes there was nothing but love.

Maybe, that's what helps Kostyantyn to beat this mysterious energy.

"Kris, if that was the problem, this is not the solution, it never was. How is it going to be a solution that you stop being you? How is it going to be a solution that you forget everything you were to become a murderer?"

"All _shadows_ are murderous…"

"But those of Dark Silence avoid killing innocents, we kill criminals, people that the police cannot catch, the same psychopaths that your strange order of brothers / angels wants to eradicate; in addition, we give a dignified end to those who, due to illness or personal decision, want to stop suffering. It's not too much, but we try to be of help. What have you done more than kill innocents?"

"I had to earn _her_ trust…"

Kristian has stopped sounding convinced; he sounds erratic, scared. He's more like a child every second, the most tender child on planet Earth.

"And why did you let _her_ do this to you? Kris, damn, there's nothing of you left!"

"Yes, I remain…!"

Something in Kristian, in the way that he looks at Kostyantyn, exudes a deep, real longing. What’s happening it’s hurting him; it hurts him so much that Kristian barely manages to stand up.

"No; you’re a murderer manipulated by a monster."

"All _shadows_ are monsters just like we are killers…"

"Only the one who enjoys doing evil is one…"

"But…"

“I have been Mother's assistant for thirty-two years, being the strongest learner of her group: I have seen cases like yours in the past, in all parts of the world. For example, I've seen it in New Zealand exactly fifteen years ago: a seventh-level persuasive created a religion around him in a small town, he attracted the faithful to devour them in perverse rituals, kept them alive, abused them, mutilated them. Perceptives are perhaps the strongest _shadows_ thanks to their mastery over energy, but persuasives are their weak point; they don’t have difficulty manipulating them. A persuasive and a perceptive together is synonymous of conflict, as it was in that town, as the persuasive kept under his control ten perceptives who were responsible for attracting humans to become faithful. We burn him, we liberate humans and we rehabilitate the perceptives. Which means that…”

“No…”

“Yes _: she_ 's manipulating you, I just need to compare yourself with them to realize: you sound just as convinced of your divine mission, _she_ sounds like a persuasive with a clear delusion of greatness, and this energy that I perceive with my basic perception is yours in conflict with _hers_. In short: you're fucked up, Kris. You’re asleep and they’re using you.”

Kostyantyn raises a hand; Kristian looks at him with broken eyes. His legs tremble and the short but wide bronze dagger trembles, trembles so much that it’s as if he were about to fall down, to fall all him to the ground, on his knees before Kostyantyn.

"They manipulated you because of the pain you had with regard to a subject that was too delicate for you, but it's not too late to amend everything they made you do!”

Kostyantyn, without reservations, holds one of his hands; Kristian trembles without stop.

"You can be the one who comes with me, you can come with me to Dark Silence and help us to defeat _her_ … _Mama_ will help you, I promise. Just…"

The dagger trembles and trembles in Kristian's hands; Nikita feels, suddenly, how a different force fills the air, an imposing, dark force.

He covers his head, terrified to see how all the lights blink at once, the ones inside, the ones outside. Everything is covered by an energy, a dark energy, as dark as the black eyes of the woman of his dream, that white woman surrounded by a choir of…

He covers his mouth to contain a scream.

A choir of angels…

It was _her_ …?

Is _she_ the one who’s getting noticed?

Kristian pushes Kostyantyn, who gives five steps back. Nikita tries to stand up, but the darkness of the energy paralyzes him. Meanwhile, the lights don’t stop, they don’t stop blinking.

Kristian is back at the beginning in the blink of an eye.

" _She_ didn’t lie, _she_ gave me proofs. Mother is lying to you, you shouldn’t stay next to her!"

A chill run through Nikita; it's _her_ , it's the darkness.

" _She_ showed me the way… When I couldn’t stand it anymore, when I had no more tears, _she_ showed me the light!"

Kostyantyn tries to advance, but he cannot. Nikita observes how, enraged and paralyzed, Kostyantyn struggles to do so.

In vain.

 _She_ ’s stopping him too.

" _She_ told me that if we gathered many angels, we could eliminate the persuasives from the world, all the persuasives, the psychopaths, the cruel ones, those who have power over one person and those who have power over millions. Corrupt politicians, murderers, rapists; people who aren’t people, evil people of the world, entities that don’t accept that the world is changing… People who repress freedom and hide the truth in the fog! People who dream of imposing their sectarian criteria on the mass, who dream of keeping repressed those who don’t fit… A world more sensitive and fuller of empathy, governed by the right people, those who protect humans from their own destruction! That's what my goddess wants, Kostya… And _she_ 's noble!"

Kostyantyn, despite the paralysis, smiles gloomily, showing all the teeth at once.

"No; _she_ ’s a wretch who takes advantage of the sensitivity of the perceptives to camouflage her own lack of empathy. The cause that comes from hatred is a wrong one! You don’t want to help people; you want to eliminate what you consider a hindrance. Killing innocents will not solve anything; the world doesn't change with violence. The Kristian that I knew would never wanted change the world with violence!"

Energy crushes the entire room; Kristian squeezes his sharp teeth while Kostyantyn struggles to get close to him.

"You don’t understand, you're blind!"

"No, I only have enough empathy; you're not on the right side." Nikita smiles when he sees how Kostyantyn does it; he agrees with what he says despite not fully understand the root of the conversation. "And if _mama_ lied as you said, well, I'm sure she had her reasons; _mama_ always has them. Because if you wanted to convince me, Kris, I want you to know that you chose two of the three people that you shouldn’t: I’ll not let you hurt _mama_ , Artem, and much less Nikita… FIRST, YOU WILL HAVE TO KILL ME!"

The energy falters, as if it were changing to another colour, as if it went from black to grey, as if the grey were dyed red. The dagger in Kristian's hand trembles, and trembles, and trembles non-stop.

Nikita understands, without really understanding, that Kostyantyn is right: Kristian is under control of someone else, someone who’s not only exerting force on others; the greater force, the greater flow of energy, is exerting on him, on Kristian and no one else. 

Soon, he notices something else: he’s free again, he can move, and lights are on outside, as if nothing bad happened. Is the black-eyed woman somewhere near, controlling Kristian? Is it costing her so much to maintain control of Kristian that only in this one and Kostyantyn manages to concentrate her power?

Is it because Kristian's energy, so full of love and kindness, doesn’t stop growing in Kostyantyn’s presence?

He knows that he cannot do anything, not being a simple human without dominion of the powers that these supernatural beings show; however, Nikita crawls to his library and holds it to get up, as relegated as possible from the scene.

Without further ado, he merely observes how Kostyantyn shows his teeth and clenches his fists, fiercely, in a spectral image. He seems to fight so hard to deal with the energy that keeps him paralyzed, he seems to struggle with so much impetus…

The lights blink, they do it inside the apartment, not outside.

Whoever it is, that black-eyed woman or someone else, is losing.

And no, it's not because of Kostyantyn; It's because of Kristian, it's because Kristian is waking up. Because the feeling that Kostyantyn awakens in him is triumphing on the inside.

"I know you wanted to protect me, I know you wanted the best for both of us, but how much did you have to give in return?! I hate you for having turned me into _this_! I contempt you!" Kostyantyn shouts without managing to let go of the energy, moving on his own axis as if balancing on the edge of a precipice.

The furniture trembles, all; the lights blink wildly.

"I hate this being you've become, Kris, because there's nothing left inside you! There's nothing left of you in you!"

Kostyantyn cries; Nikita discovers that he’s not saying all this to destabilize him.

He says it because he feels it.

"Shut up!"

"No!" Kostyantyn roars, angry. "There's only one way to go back to being who you are! You have to get rid of who controls you, because I'm not perceptive, but I feel how _she_ crush you! I know it's _her_ , that _she_ 's somewhere, maybe not even close, handling you like a puppet! And you weren’t this kind of person…! You were you and that was the best of you!"

The last cry is accompanied by an overload of feelings. It’s Kostyantyn’s hatred that fills the room, it’s Kostyantyn’s hatred that’s breathed in the air, it's Kostyantyn’s hatred that breaks Kristian's energy, which splits in two, which breaks him to the point of making the dagger fall, of making Kristian fall, of doing that, kneeling on the ground, holding his head with overwhelming strength, until tearing strands of hair, to contain a scream of the most twisted agony.

And Kostyantyn is released, at last. Serious, looks who is in front of him.

Kristian cries on his knees, still.

"It's you, Kris…"

Kristian looks at the ground. He covers his face with his hands and breaks into sobs. Nods.

Nikita notices Kostyantyn's coldness: he must have a lot of grudge against Kristian. Somehow, despite everything that happened, Nikita feels sorry about him.

It wasn’t his fault to be controlled and…

"Niki, I didn’t want it to be like that, forgive me," Kostyantyn says as he takes two steps towards him, leaving Kristian behind. "I'm going to imagine that if we crossed paths it was because we should, because if we hadn't done it, maybe I could never have solved Kristian's riddle or discovered that wretch. I'll not force you to anything, I swear to you, but…" Kostyantyn, when reaching him, caresses the mole containing tears that Nikita doesn’t finish to understand. He only understands that all this is more intense and difficult than it seems for him, that Kostyantyn has just experienced a situation that has been very painful. "I have to take you with me, Niki. I have to get you safe! I have to take you there so they don't catch you. Because they'll come back for you, understand? And I don't…!"

And a scream from Kostyantyn stops space and time, it does it at the same time as the energy is perceived again, at the precise moment when all the lights around, inside, outside, blink with sickly synchronization.

Nikita sees everything in slow motion: Kristian, with the bronze dagger, has wounded Kostyantyn in the back, in the waist area. He has sunk the dagger as if his body was made of cotton.

When Kostyantyn falls covering his waist with one hand, on the right side of his body, Nikita hears him groan in pain.

With the bloody dagger trembling in his hand, Kristian points him up raising his hand at one side of his face.

"Dark Silence must disappear…" he says, and from his voice comes the pain, and the energy only crushes him, and Kostyantyn loses blood on the floor. "Nikita must come with me; together, we must make Dark Silence disappear…"

And Nikita looks at the dagger, and sees how Kristian holds it.

"Carmilla…" he whispers.

Kristian looks at him for a single moment, but he does it differently. He does it as he has looked at Kostyantyn by getting rid of the energy, with repentance, with purity.

Why?

Nikita cannot think about it; he can only look at how he holds the dagger, how he points it towards Kostyantyn.

Like a stake.

Like the stake with which, in _Carmilla_ , they had killed her, precisely.

Do real vampires die with stakes? Is it myth or is it reality?

He's going to kill Kostyantyn…?

Deranged by the nightmare that he’s experiencing with all his senses, Nikita cries, trembles, and feels unable to move. Holding on to the library, he moves his eyes between the dagger and Kostyantyn, once, a thousand times.

"Dark Silence must disappear…"

He's going to kill Kostyantyn.

Kristian takes one, two, three steps. Kostyantyn tries to move back, but loses a lot of blood.

He's going to kill him…

"Sorry, Kostya, but it's late…" sobs Kristian as he advances more and more.

He’s going to kill him…!

All the lights from the apartment turn off; Kristian screams, and Nikita feels how the energy, his own, moves him forward.

"NO!" he pleads with a broken voice.

Runs, covers Kostyantyn, embraces him.

After, all the lights come back. He listens to Kristian whisper "no" and "no" infinite times, how he cries, at last awake and with no more energy around, but no, he doesn’t really hear anything.

He focusses on what's in front of him: Kostyantyn.

Kostyantyn, who looks at him with his always unequal eyes, first there, at the eyes; then, at the chest.

"No…" he murmurs while looking at him there.

Nikita tries to say something, but it’s like a fog had embraced him, thick to a point where he couldn’t breathe. When he tries to speak, he feels that something hangs him, that it stains him. With a clumsy hand, he touches his lips.

He raises his hand between Kostyantyn's face and him, he sees it tremble in the foreground, diffuse: it's stained with blood.

Follows the path of Kostyantyn's eyes: the dagger has pierced his chest from behind.

"The stake…" he whispers without a voice, and how much does it cost.

Then, the dagger leaves him and everything becomes distorted.

When he sees himself in the fog, he knows that he’s lying on the ground, and he understands that that's what he dreamed just before meeting Kostyantyn, after finding _Carmilla_ on the floor of the bookstore: it was the future.

Metaphorically, it was his own death.

He sees how Kostyantyn cries on him and understands everything, every symbolism, every detail, especially the most obvious, the moon crying blood on him.

They are Kostyantyn's eyes, crying blood, crying to him.

"Niki, no…" he hears him say.

Nikita smiles, or at least he feels that he does; he smiles because he cannot talk anymore, because he has no way of doing it. Because the fog that has suddenly surrounded him weighs too much.

"T-Turn him," Kristian says, whose voice no longer sounds as before, possessed, but genuine, full of love, kindly; pure, like one of a real angel, not cardboard. "Hurry, Kostya! You lose him!”

"No…"

"HE'S DYING, DO IT!"

"I DON’T KNOW HOW TO DO IT!”

A hand pulls Kostyantyn from the neck; Kristian looks at him angrily.

"How is it possible that you don't know how to do it?! You can’t let him go!" Kristian holds something in the fog that weighs more and more, Nikita perceives that it’s his own hand, the right one, still stained with blood. Is he taking his pulse? Why is it like he doesn't feel anything…? "I'll tell you when, come on, bite him!"

"I CAN’T FORCE HIM! It will not work…!"

"YOU AREN’T FORCING HIM, BELIEVE IN ME!”

And Kostyantyn looks into his eyes, and cries over his eyes, and turns the grey fog into red.

"Forgive me, Niki…!" he says, crying, and in an imperceptible movement he feels something hurt him in the neck.

Later, Nikita only sees red, Kostyantyn's red eyes, Kostyantyn's red mouth, Kostyantyn's red wrist, which sinks into his mouth.

"Please, accept…" he pleads being a sea of tears, desperate, shattered, trembling and shaking everything around him. "Look at me, look at me and don't leave me… Don't leave me! Don't…! NIKITA!"

He feels how an energy fills him, an energy that he doesn't understand or know, different, beautiful, bright but dark.

But the fog is already too thick.

But he cannot see anything else.

 

**.**

 

**.**

 

**.**

 

It could be said that he didn’t feel this way since 1986. Thus, awake, with nothing but himself functioning in his head.

Should he warn others? He knows that there are _shadows_ with great intentions, that the community with which he has spent so many years is full of good, genuine _shadows_.

How is it possible that _she_ has manipulated them like this?

So many times, all repeating the same, "we are _shadows_ and we must change the world", but everything turned out to be a lie. Now he knows; after stabbing Nikita, he understood absolutely everything.

He was nothing but a coward.

He was no more than a fool without courage to face his mistakes and his own feelings.

The Kristian that Kostyantyn once loved no longer exists.

But he’s awake. And it's late.

He will never forgive him, not having caused the death that has caused, in turn, the repetition of the pattern, the condemn to the same memory.

That he had to turn Nikita into a _shadow_ so that he wouldn’t die in his arms; the same thing that had happened to them thirty-two years ago.

"Between four and eight hours," Kristian says, defeated. Looks at the ground while talking; he cannot look at Kostyantyn, no more, nevermore. He no longer has the right to do so, and knowing it makes his body tremble profusely. "Sometimes less, sometimes more time. The human body needs to assimilate the change, it's not magical, but it depends of each human being. Our blood must infect the body, slow down the decomposition process and readapt the metabolism. Once it reaches the heart, and the blood infect it all, he’ll begin to transform. When the blood reaches the brain, what should happen shortly after the last, he will wake up."

"It was what you did to me…"

Kristian squeezes the eyelids with excessive force.

"Yes."

"It was the same…"

"It was."

"Go away, Kristian…"

"Kostya, please…"

"Go away." Kostyantyn's voice doesn't sound sad, shattered, touched; it sounds like that night, dead in life. "I don’t care if _she_ kills you, if it bothers _her_ that I know so much, if know so much puts you or puts us in danger. For the second time, you have taken away everything that mattered to me. First my human life, my human parents, my country, my dreams; now, after so much effort to adapt to be _this_ , you took away from me the person who filled me with hope, new dreams, the purest happiness I ever felt. Never, even though you have helped me, I’ll forgive you. And if Nikita doesn't wake up…"

"He’ll wake up: I heard his song. He was going to ask you…" He doesn't know if it’s right to tell him, but is there something right or wrong after what he did? "If you’re worried about the conviction, forget it: Nikita wanted to be a _shadow_ ; he wanted to be with you."

Kristian feels that Kostyantyn looks at him, he perceives it without difficulty. He doesn't dare to look at him, however.

No. Nevermore.

"Mother is on the way; they already felt you," he says to Kostyantyn when he feels a furious energy heading towards the window he has in front. "I don't know what will happen with me, but I do know what will happen with you and Nikita: _she_ will look for you and will not rest until you are silenced. You must leave Ukraine for a while; _she_ ’s outside Kiev, preparing all for her attack."

"Even that you took away from me…"

Kristian massages his chest. It doesn't hurt like this since he was human. It hurts so much that he only wants one thing.

Be anesthetized again.

"Kostya…"

“Go away."

"I’m sorry," he says, and he runs to the balcony and throws himself into the void without looking back. Listens, in the air, whispers of other people of the building. _What were those screams? Did they come from the boy on the eighth floor? Should we call the police?_ Nothing of what he listens interests him.

He only can see, hear, feel something else.

Nikita didn't hesitate to save him. His pulse didn't tremble despite of being no more than a human. He saved Kostyantyn in more ways than evident.

Everything he didn't do.

Everything he could do, but he didn’t.

Nikita won, but at what price?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi... :')
> 
> Mmm... It's difficult to say something coherent after this chapter. I think that the "fog" scene was the second that I saw in my mind when I started to think in writing a vampire AU back in June. The first one was the kiss in the bookstore (?). 
> 
> I'm sorry, I know that was... hard. But this means something, all that happens here it does. This has to do with Kostyantyn and his character development.
> 
> Thanks Blake for keeping my secret (?). T___T
> 
> Niki will come back as a shadow? Well, if he doesn't, this story will end in the next chapter. XD I don't want to spoiler, but it's quite obvious that... XD 
> 
> And what about Kristian? Well, there's a lot of things about him that we still don't know, so, we will see. He was convinced, but now he doesn't, but the control it depends of his emotions, and that's a huge problem. 
> 
> Why it takes so much time to become a shadow? Well, I hate when, in vampire stories, the transformation takes only one minute, I think it's too quick, I need some suspense to believe that this could be real (?). It's part of trying that things make sense without saying "magically, this happened". I try to be convincent. 
> 
> Sorry.
> 
> Writing this with "Frozen" by Within Temptation was a mistake, it puts me very sad... My golden dream is to see them on ESC someday representing their country. T___T
> 
> That song it's pure magic, I recommend it. :') 
> 
> And "From the inside" by Linkin Park, the song with which I translate. I love it. 
> 
> And about Niki's song... Well, it's in Russian, not in English.The second verse it's SO perfect, so fucking perfect. 
> 
> Kill me.
> 
> I will change the summary soon; I hate it, and a new moment comes, so it's getting old (?). And I will change a couple of tags too. I already did it.
> 
> A lot of things can sound confusing, but this will make more sense in next chapters. Sorry for being so dramatic and silly. This was pure symbolism to me and I needed it.
> 
> Now, I'm free. :') 
> 
> THANK YOU SO MUCH!!! ♥ 
> 
> Memi, Jadoremelekseev, Di, Blake, Kostya Anon, Mysteriousroseangel, thanks for reading, thanks forevaaaaaaaaaaa!!! 
> 
> See you in next chapter! ♥ 
> 
> THANKS!!!


	14. XIII

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kostyantyn didn't wanted to be that way, but it doesn't mean that things will be as before.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading. Just thank you. :')

**XIII**

He looks at the keys of Mother's piano without breathing, without blinking, doing nothing more than leaving his eyes completely fixed on them, in his most intimate confidantes, in his best friends since he can remember.

Today, now, with everything that has happened, he doesn't only see them in the colour they have, white and black; he feels them like that, in grayscale.

He lost him.

Takes a deep breath, fights against his own memory; when Mother, Artem and Jandiara came to Nikita's apartment and found the devastating scene, one that Kostyantyn has already hastened to block in the depths of his mind and heart, Mother embraced him with such force that he still feels her pressing him even though she's not there, that he's alone in her rehearsal room, one that even Citrus doesn’t prowl.

Trying to remain calm, Artem asked him how he had done it. He answered without knowing where he was or what was happening, locked in Mother's arms, trapped in a deep shock:

"Kristian took his pulse and told me when to bite him, and a moment later I gave him my blood by biting my wrist…"

And Nikita was staring at him, looking at him with a smile in his eyes, crying human tears for the last time.

He covers his face, breathes, blinks.

"No…" he murmurs rocking back and forth.

When the image is blocked again, he returns to the previous state, to be alive because of the different blood that he has and that makes his body work on the threshold between life and death.

To seem dead despite not being so in the most technical concept.

Mother forbade him to keep looking; she took him alone to Dark Silence headquarters, and just left him when Artem and Jandiara arrived with Nikita.

"I'm going to take care of everything personally, sweetie. Everything will be fine, you did it well, we’ll receive him in the best way! Just give a few hours to the transformation."

Since then, he has remained this way, here, before the keys that are grayscale not because of their colour, but because of what they transmit to him.

Nothing.

Nobody has asked him anything, he hasn't been able to say what he has discovered thanks to Kristian and his emotional instability, which seemed impenetrable, in the beginning, but which was weaker than others that he has seen in perceptives manipulated by persuasives. He has no mind to deal with that, not now, because he cares little that a wretch is planning to destroy Dark Silence, that assures to know Mother from other times and has some kind of perceptive army with her, those whom, with impunity, she calls _angels_.

Only Nikita cares.

He knows he did it well and he knows that Kristian didn’t lie to him by assuring him that, having listened to Nikita’s song, he knew there was conviction in him, but knowing it doesn’t make things simpler or reduce a bit of all the pain that he feels.

The blood of the human to be turned into a _shadow_ must be extracted when the pulse begins to be lost; right after that, the human must drink the _shadow_ 's blood, which produces the energy exchange necessary for the transformation, and that must be accompanied by conviction in the human, because the conviction predisposes the energy of the body, it makes it compatible with the _shadow_ 's blood. It's not something that any _shadow_ in the world really understands at all, studies of different communities have thrown diffuse data about that, but he has seen dozens of failed transformations by lack of conviction; that, of course, cannot be coincidental.

It's not for what Kristian told him; Kostyantyn is sure that Nikita was convinced by how he looked into his eyes, because he looked at him with the most impressive, indescribable, infinite love that he has seen in some eyes while drinking the blood of his wrist.

That isn’t the problem, all that is fine.

The problem is that he didn’t want it to be like that, turn him quickly to save him from an inevitable human death, to expose him to such great suffering to take him to his side of existence.

He wanted it to be special.

He rubs his face, fighting against silence, against loneliness, against the darkness that comes from his broken heart; sometime in the last few weeks, shyly, Kostyantyn had dared to fantasize it in the privacy of his coffin: he wanted to turn him into a _shadow_ in some special place, to keep him calm, so he wouldn't get nervous, and do it after finally taking the lesson that, for his story with Kristian, he had never accepted to Artem. He wanted to do it well, slowly, after a thousand kisses, before another thousand. He wanted to await his awakening as a _shadow_ and receive him in his second birth with songs and love, with passion, with his neck ready, with his heart full of blood. With a warmth that now they will perceive to each other, because both will be equally cold and will have the senses equally exacerbated thanks to their different nature.

But it didn’t have to be like that.

To see Nikita like that, leaving him like that, in such a…

He squeezes his face and holds a scream. No, not that image! Not again, no, he doesn't want it, he cannot.

No.

"Kostya."

He raises his face to whoever calls him on the other side of the piano: Artem.

Nothing, more than looking at him, he does to answer.

"Mother has finished preparing everything, she’s with him: in two hours he’ll be able to wake up."

Looking at the keys, the grayscale that doesn’t change, that remains as dead in life as he feels beyond the conceptual, Kostyantyn raises his eyebrows, surprised.

It didn't have to be like that, no. It had to be different.

"Just that? Only two hours has passed…"

Artem nods.

"When you turn a human into a _shadow_ ," he explains," there are very subtle details of the body that begin to mutate very early. Nikita is already changing, it shows in his nails and in his hair: he’ll not take long to wake up considering how soon his body showed these changes. I had my doubts, because his wound is deep and he'll need to feed _a lot_ to stay strong in his first hours, but he'll be fine."

"Okay…"

Kostyantyn continues looking at the keys. He knows that Artem is looking at him with an incisive fixity, he feels it in every corner of his being, but he does nothing to follow the conversation.

Artem always criticizes him in moments like this, always calls attention to his imprudence and passion, for not doing things well enough. As Mother says, he has the soul of a manager: he always wants things to be done well.

He doesn’t expect what happens:

Artem sits next to him on the bench that’s in front of the piano and hugs him.

"Kostya, don't stay quiet. It's not a good symptom, not in you."

"I…"

"You didn't want it to be like that, right?"

Kostyantyn fakes a smile.

“Isn't obvious what I’ll answer…?"

Artem laughs despite the obvious seriousness that he has.

"We know how hard is for you, but I think it's important to remind you that we're not talking about the same case. What you lived in the past didn't…"

Sad, Kostyantyn shakes his head.

"Kristian asked me not to leave him; I asked Nikita not to leave me…"

"I know the coincidence hurts, Kostya, but…"

Overcome for the anguish, Kostyantyn throws hard what fills his heart:

"What if he ends up hating me like I hate Kristian?”

Because that's what all it's about, what worries him.

Because doesn't matter how convinced he was at that moment, if…

"I don't know Nikita, but I do know you." Artem rubs his shoulder and smiles at him. "If he got to know you enough to know who you are and what you feel, then he’ll have no way to hate you. If this time you chose well, I assure you that this will be the case."

That part also has him disturbed. In fact, he had chosen well the last time. But no, he doesn't want to think about everything he has discovered about Kristian.

It's too late for everything.

"I want to be alone, please…"

Reluctantly, or that Kostyantyn perceives, Artem agrees but not before reminding him that he will be close if he needs him.

“Change your clothes, take a hot bath. You deserve it,” he says before leaving.

He does?

Just like that, alone again, Kostyantyn looks at the keys, always in grayscale, always as dead as he is emotionally after having seen the most terrible image in history, one even worse than that last human image that he remembers, that of Kristian crying blood on him.

The death.

If Nikita hates him after this, then…

 

**…**

 

Three brick walls and a door of fire: there’s no prison more effective than that for a _shadow_. Kristian, fed up with the heat that the fire transmits, wraps himself in a corner. He sings in whispers to try to relax, he sings all the songs he has dedicated to Kostya the last thirty-two years.

And Kostya, with good reason, nothing but hate feels for him. And it's his fault, for had been and still been, now, a coward.

He didn't need more than to arrive at the residence where his brothers spend their days in the outskirts of Kiev to be trapped; the intention of alerting them was of no use. He tried to scream, to warn the deceit to which they are subjected, but there was no way.

Five _shadows_ holding him, nullifying him and silencing him were enough.

While humming, he thinks about it. Could it be that an emotional blow is necessary to awaken the manipulated _shadows_? Could it be that it’s not enough to try to make them see the truth? Thirty-two years believing everything _she_ made him believe! And only Kostya could wake him up.

When he understands that he has let himself be caught in vain, he contains tears against his knees.

He’s still a coward.

The door of fire vanishes when someone, from outside, extinguishes the flames that are released from the floor. When _she_ enters, the flames re-ignite behind her back. Her figure is embellished thanks to the light that fire reflects on her white skin.

Kristian looks at her: always wearing a white veil covering her dark hair, always with those black eyes that seem to swallow him, _she_ smiles at him with her usual charm _._

"Why, my boy? You've always been a saint, my saint, my spoiled one."

On another occasion, Kristian would had broken into tears; now, awake, nothing has any effect on him.

Not after Kostya, so longed, so imagined, had told him that he hates him.

"You manipulate us at your whim, you lied to us all the time," he answers, touched. He contains the fury as much as he can and remembers that caution is his best weapon at this time. "Seeing Kostya opened my eyes, made me feel awake, free of a weight I couldn’t describe, just by seeing him."

 _She_ , always calm, enlarges her smile.

"I didn’t lie, my boy. Your dear Kostya is blinded."

"But Mother isn't a persuasive!"

"But she has lied to everyone. I’m very sorry that Kostya has convinced you otherwise. But don't worry: we'll fix this, I swear to you. Because the source of power, our God, is on our side."

 _She_ extends her hands towards him; Kristian focuses his eyes on the fire that burns fiercely from behind.

There’s no escape. There’s not.

 _She_ holds his face, turns it towards her, looks into his eyes without him being able to do anything about it, not considering the dark energy that soon crushes his head.

There will be no escape. Without having Kostya nearby, without having the only person who knows how to wake him up, there will never be one.

**…**

 

One last touch and everything will be ready. Smiling, Mother takes the bouquet of red roses that Rob has get and tears off the petals one by one. Sweetly, with ceremonial delicacy, she lets them fall on the body in full transformation.

Walking around the elevated platform, she sings while dropping the petals.

"’ _Cause until you walk where I walk it's just all talk…_ "

When finishes, excited, she leans to his right and hugs him by the waist, on which she herself has put his hands. Mother holds him while she smells his cheek.

She’s in love.

"The same thing has happened to the three of us, to reach this second chance in the middle of an undesirable situation," she says, moved. "But it makes me happy, you know? It makes me happy to know that you can help him overcome what happened to him, something that neither Artem nor I have been able to achieve for not getting him to love us as he loves you. Or so I hope, because I have a lot of faith in you, Nikita, and in the feelings that he has for you…" She strokes his cold hand and palpates his nails with her fingers: they are pointed, like those of any _shadow_. What a great symptom: less than an hour, hopefully. "I hope you can help him."

Because finding them as she did so a few hours ago, Kostyantyn over him, squeezing him, holding him against him with red tears staining the two of them, nothing she could wish for but to undo what had happened, that being a _shadow_ would allow her to travel through time, go back and save them from that nefarious situation. 

She could do nothing more than embrace Kostyantyn, lull him like a son and pray, pray to God for Nikita, for his awakening.

And how useless she feels.

She sits down next to his hip and looks at him without blinking: he's beautiful. He looks like an angel, he has a different kind of beauty, not imposing and exotic like that of Kostyantyn, that beauty so sensual and striking, but soft, sweet, merely aesthetic, vulnerable. Nikita is more like Alva: he's as delicate as a rose.

That's why she asked for those flowers and not others: she needed roses, because no other flower could have paid tribute, not enough, to his essentially adorable beauty.

She gets up and looks around: she has sent to install a chapel, as she calls them although it’s not exactly one of it, in every Dark Silence headquarters around the world, all with a similar model: exposed brick walls painted black, white and red lights coming from lamps located at the corners, a platform where to let the body complete in calm its transformation located on the top of an altar separated by ten steps of a stair from the floor. It’s a ceremony that was her idea and that all the Dark Silence headquarters fulfil, as it’s strictly forbidden, in the stipulated rules of behaviour, to transform a _shadow_ away from the headquarters, all in order to avoid the excessive propagation of the gift and to control the procedure and the non-creation of persuasives, the most dangerous _shadows_.

She has lit candles at the floor, around the platform, which is made of stone and is covered by a white mantle. It's like a funeral, but the other way around.

The farewell of the human and the welcome of the _shadow_ ; the symbol of the end and the beginning.

The reception ritual.

Mother crosses her arms and looks at Nikita once more.

She approaches him, unbuttons three buttons of the black shirt that she has chosen for him; the wound is thin, but extensive, it crosses the chest slightly inclined to the left.

What a strange weapon Kristian must have used.

She knows that she should ask Kostyantyn what happened and how it happened, but that Nikita awakens is, for now, the only priority.

She whistles a song. Citrus jumps on Nikita and licks one of his hands.

"My love, I'm going to need a little favour," she tells the cat, who purrs against Nikita's hand. 

She needs to heal that wound as soon as he wakes up; she needs to talk to him as soon as he does so.

 

**…**

 

After a painful shower, painful because of the blood and the image that it has risen, he's still there, before the piano, which continues, in turn, looking and feeling in grayscale, until Alva appears in the doorway; Kostyantyn watches her without really doing it. He’s still in shock.

I hadn’t to be like that, no.

"It was like an explosion," she says, "I felt how everything exploded around you, and how _you_ especially exploded. It was… horrible. I notified mom as soon as I felt it; before, I felt absolutely nothing; I tried, I did everything possible, but I couldn’t. That perceptive is very strong, he completely blocked all the energy around you as soon as you left."

It had to be special, yes.

Kostyantyn sighs.

"And are very strong those for who he works."

It had to be special.

Alva approaches three steps; Kostyantyn notices the shyness on her face. He knows that she wants to ask him a thousand questions, that she’s intrigued, worried. Also, somehow, maybe because she’s allowing him to know thanks to her high energetic abilities, he’s sure that she wants to tell him something.

"What do you need?" he asks, not without annoyance.

It had to be special, very special, the most special moment possible.

Alva smiles; how sweet she is. As sweet as…

No, not that image.

He breathes deeply with trembling hands, shaken by a new and traumatic memory; Alva reaches the bench and sits next to him, right where Artem has sat before. She takes a hand from him with confidence, without doubts, and closes her eyes.

Kostyantyn wants to forbid her to use her powers with him, but soon, when he perceives the incalculable warmth that Alva's presence transmits to him, he desists.

It had to be special, damn…

He’s exhausted, exhausted from that damn image, how it returns to his mind without his consent, how it’s painted again on his pupils. That precise moment in which the human heart stopped beating.

That precise moment, the one in which he lost him.

"If you're going to tell me that it wasn't my fault, Artem already told me and _mama_ too. I don’t want to…"

Alva smiles with her eyes closed. Squeezes his hand with admirable delicacy.

"The _shadow_ only dissociates from the person when the sun illuminates it," Alva says, thoughtfully, "the sun is so, but so strong, that it makes the _shadow_ and the person divide completely. That's a mistake, Mélovin: you shouldn't allow the two images that you project to distract you."

"Huh?"

Alva releases him. Looks at him.

"It’s you who should value his own feelings, who should value them to be able to order them. You matter too, and you do it too much."

Kostyantyn leans back. Feeling invaded, but intrigued, he cannot answer anything; absorbed in Alva's celestial eyes, he doesn't even feel capable of thinking.

She reminds him too much of him.

Too much.

So much that he feels angry with himself, for that image, for having allowed that image to happen.

It had to be special.

"But…" he whispers without a voice, with a lump in his throat.

"He’ll help you. I’ll help him to learn to help you." Alva smiles. "It will be a pleasure to help you to educate Nikita in all what imply to be a perceptive _shadow_."

And then, it’s true.

Kostyantyn blinks, which, just as when he breathes, does for mere necessity, as if doing so would allow him to clear up his thoughts. He’s clinging so much to that image, that of the death and the bloody tears, that he's forgetting all those images that will concern life.

Nikita will be reborn as a _shadow_ in a very short time. He will be a _shadow_ and there will be no more secrets; he will be able to tell him everything he likes and also love him as his conceptual heart demands, with the body and with the emotions that the body allows him to transmit.

But the guilt that he feels is like a thousand knives piercing him at once.

"See? You forgot it," Alva continues, now smiling, "you had forgotten that Nikita will be a new-born _shadow_ and that you’ll be able to teach him all that it means to be one of us. To use all his basic skills, to feed, to turn off, to love, to feel, to enjoy, to kill. You can explain everything to him and, thanks to him, see your own existence from another perspective. I know you feel guilt; I feel it come off of you without needing to touch you, but I want to help you understand that…"

And Alva shuts up.

And Alva stands up.

And Alva, smiling, breathes as deep as possible when raising her hands.

"Mélovin, it's time."

"For what?" he asks, hypnotized, dizzy because of the guilt that is mixed with happiness.

Because he would have wanted it to be special. Because, according to Kristian, Nikita was going to ask him to turned him into a _shadow_.

Because nothing will make him happier than being able to be free in his arms.

But the guilt… But if he hates him…

But that image…!

"Come on!" Alva says walking quickly towards the door. She turns towards him on the threshold, looks at him with eyes enraptured with the energy, that look that perceptives put when something that they perceive overwhelms them in the best way. "Nikita is waking up, his energy begins to feel, and it's wonderful, Mélovin. It's simply wonderful."

But the guilt… but if he hates him for…

But the image, the farewell!

But love…

Destroyed, he lets his heart to guide him. Full of love, of hope, of longing that he doesn’t even comes to understand by the presence of guilt that clouds all his senses at once, Kostyantyn runs along with Alva.

 

**…**

 

He enters the chapel with a serious face and hands in his pockets. Moves towards the altar between red and white lights illuminating the black walls in faint tones, noticing the lighted candles around the platform and the rose petals dispersed everywhere.

From the first minute, noticing the love that Kostya had developed, he hated that Nikita. And not out of jealousy, not out of envy or that kind of inferior feelings; it was pure concern.

The problem was Kostya and the fear that what happened would happen, that the story would repeat itself.

And it was repeated, finally.

And he couldn't save him in time.

The problem wasn’t nor isn’t Nikita, he knows it, he understands it; the problem is that Kostya is suffering. The solution, however, wasn't to forbid it.

But how much it hurts and how incapable he is of not to blame the body that, very soon, will be a _shadow_.

Reaches the platform and smiles before Mother, who sings 'The sound of music' with indescribable feeling sitting next to the body, while holding Nikita's right hand with a rosary caught between the palms of the two.

He approaches her from behind only when she finishes the song.

"And it happened," he says.

"And it happened," she says.

Looking into her eyes, Artem recalls the talk they had just after Kostya told Mother about Nikita for the first time: he thought that he would distract him from the reason that brought them to Ukraine; she thought that Kostya deserved to fall in love for too many reasons, the main one his past, and that they couldn't forbid something like that, not to him, not to love.

She won, because she always does so: Artem promised not to talk about Nikita to Kostya, to respect his departures and not to put too much pressure on him with the investigation. Kostya had split in two to not neglect anything, had tried and he was witness to it.

But Nikita had to die like this, like Kostya had died before.

Artem observes him: yes, Kostya has always liked this type of beauty, sweet-looking people are his weakness. It had been Kristian, it is Nikita.

"He’s already pale," comments when he notices how his skin colour has changed, how he has mutated from the gold when they found him right after his human death. He’s not as pale as Kostya, much less as he or as Mother, who are whiter than pale, but his skin already shows what will happen very soon.

"It’s close," Mother says.

"Yes, I think that it will happen at any time."

They look at Nikita at the same time; how beautiful he is, what a beautiful _shadow_ he will be. Because all _shadows_ are beautiful, _all_ , but he brings a very particular beauty from his human life.

He will be dazzling.

Mother breaks the silence:

"Did our son tell you something?"

Artem denies.

"Nothing."

"After Nikita wakes up the four of us we'll talk."

"Of course."

"I want the two of them to go away with Alva. I would like you to take them all to another country."

Artem frowns when he hears Mother.

"Why do you want us to leave?”

"Alva and Nikita are perceptives; according to how little Alva told us about deductions, probably it's dangerous for them to stay here. I don't want what happened to Borysko and the others; I want Nikita to be trained in his abilities as a _shadow_ and as perceptive as far as possible, that he becomes good at it and he can fight with us; he’ll be of great support. It would be risky to send Nikita to another continent being as young as a _shadow_ , but if they go to a nearby country I’ll stay a little calmer. Please, entrust this to Hanna on my behalf, prepare everything and leave as soon as possible."

Artem nods, serious.

"And why do I have to go with them?"

"Because I want you to supervise our son. Also, I want you to take care of him, advise him and stay close to him. I'm sure he'll be very moved and he'll have a hard time focusing."

"You have to stop overprotecting him."

Mother kisses Nikita's hand, which she hasn’t released at any time.

"I'll never do it and you know it. That's why I'm here, waiting for Nikita: I have to protect our son's heart."

"But you’ll not come with us?"

"I have to stay and try to catch Kristian and to gather powerful _shadows_ for the war that, without doubt, is approaching. When Nikita is ready, after his learning period and when his _shadow_ metabolism gets better, we’ll fight together. This death will not be in vain, neither this nor that of all humans and _shadows_ who have died for a wrong cause.”

Artem nods again.

"Okay," he agrees.

In silence, they look at Nikita again. Mother and Artem have always had that inner joke, to consider Kostya their son. She has always spoiled him and he has always scolded him; what a _cliché_. But he has always been happy to feel that way with her.

He has always been happy to think that Kostya is…

An energy makes the light blink.

Surprised, Artem observes Nikita's body: he’s trembling subtly, but persistently.

"Finally…" Mother whispers with a smile. The light blinks again, it does it for a moment, with weakness. "Leave me alone with him, please, and talk to Hanna.”

"Sure."  
Artem walks away. When he goes down the ten steps, he turns towards them: Nikita's body trembles a little more each time. If the lights are blinking like this because of him, his power as perceptive will be to fear.

When he leaves the chapel, Kostyantyn and Alva are at the door, in the middle of the dark stone corridor.

“Finally, Kostya,” he says in a fatherly tone, “he's already waking up.”

He has always liked to think of Kostya as a son, since feeling him as such allows him to be all the overprotective that his presence always demands.

Because that _cliché_ is just a lie: something has this little bastard, something to be loved this way, unconditionally.

 

**…**

Once Artem leaves, Mother tightens the hand that she has held so well during all this time.

The body trembles, and trembles, and trembles. The skin cools more, hardens; the hair becomes darker, thick and shiny. The face throws back, the half-open lips show sharp white fangs.

The eyes, two wonderful dark eyes, open.

Mother looks at him; she's hypnotized. His beauty is more moving than she has anticipated.

She gives him a moment to blink and breathe, human reflexes that he will lose soon, and finally intercepts his eyes.

He’s a simply precious creature.

He's a gem, which will protect Kostyantyn from all the pain that from his human life he drags, the one that keeps him walking with his eyes looking back.

"Welcome to Dark Silence, Nikita Alekseev," she says, happy, touched. And what energy comes from him, and what vulnerability and sweetness he transmits, and what purity, and how perfect she feels him for Kostyantyn, for his son.

And how immense it seems, in his delicate black pupils, the conviction.

Kostyantyn will be happy no matter what happens, even if she has to give everything of herself, even her eternity, in return.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi!
> 
> I don't know what to say than THANK YOU for reading my story. :')
> 
> It's humble, very humble, and my English only gets worse, but I put all my heart. In this specific chapter, there's a lot of my own feelings and it was very hard, but now I feel free.
> 
> Write can cure us. 
> 
> Oh! I can say something (?). About Alva, I have two aesthetic angels in my life, as I call them, the most ethereal and beautiful human beings that I ever see, one of them is Nikita, of course, and the other is Danish alternative model Maria Amanda. She's the love of my life, my one and true love. My queen, the type of beauty I call supreme and drives me crazy since 2013.
> 
> No need to worryyyyy (?).
> 
> I imagine her when I write Alva, so angelic and delicate. I can't.
> 
> If someday I see them together maybe I would die. (?)
> 
> (((Mél it's in my group of dark-and-sexy-demons (?) with Eliza Dushku XD)))
> 
> And Jandiara, I picture her like my beloved Marta, the Brazilian football player. She's AMAZING and beautiful and strong and talented and everything. :')
> 
> And that's all. Thanks for reading, truly. Thanks to all, but today specially thanks to Jadoremelekseev for all the support and kindness in all the updates. I want to dedicate this chapter for you, because you left that last comment in a really bad day for me and it helped me a lot to smile again.
> 
> Thank you so much, I will not forget it. :')
> 
> Thanks to all of you for reading! See you next week. Next chapter it's ALL about them, all, absolutely all. 
> 
> I wrote all this nonsense JUST for THAT scene.
> 
> Blake, espero vengan días hermosos, los que te merecés. Sos lo más. ♥ Quizá no veas esto, pero te lo digo igual. :')
> 
> Gracias siempre.
> 
> Thank youuuuu ALL ♥


	15. XIV

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's a promise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading. ♥

**XIV**

 

It’s like having his chest split in two. He doesn't understand the sensation; he doesn't remember anything, he doesn’t know who he is.

Or what.

He just knows that there’s something called _eyes_ and something called _eyelids_ , that with the eyes he can visualize the world, that with the eyelids he can censor the eyes. He knows that he has eyelids, that the skin that forms them it weighs, that he wants to open them, but he cannot, besides knowing that he has a chest, and yes, is split in two.

Slowly, the memories return, they do so while a dark energy, although warmth, it gets into him through the cracks in his chest in order to take over his complete existence. 

Kostyantyn, the vampire in the bookstore, the charming smile, the unequal eyes. The mouth that kisses, the hands that touch, the heart that doesn’t beat, but feels, but lives. Cold that nothing but warmth transmits.

It's him, the vampire. It's the guy who has opened his chest, the one who has split it in two, not with a wound, but with the voice, with the feelings transmitted with the voice.

Kostyantyn, more beautiful than ever, with the passion of his fingers on the piano equal with that of his lips. Kostyantyn singing between one kiss and the other, manipulating him with a supernatural force, projecting red colours around him, the red of blood, of love, of passion.

Of everything that means something for him, what it knows how to make his heart beat.

Kostyantyn crying blood on his face, just like the dream. Kostyantyn's eyes being the moon pouring out red rain on him.

Kostyantyn is…?

And then, just like that, his eyes open.

The world he sees before his pupils isn’t the same.

He studies what's in front of him: it looks like a ceiling, the ceiling of a church. Or not: of a chapel. Red and white lights, coming from lamps located in the corners, make the atmosphere intimate, almost erotic. Black brick walls surround everything. But it's not about being in an unknown place, that’s not the reason why he feels in another world; it’s about how he sees the world: is clearer, has more vivid colours, with shades that tear his eyes for the beauty they exude. Things look different, transmit another kind of sensations, some so intense that they come to collapse him, to exhaust him.

He remembers Louis in _Interview with the vampire_ : ‘the world had changed, yet stayed the same’, he said when he woke up as a vampire. That's what all of this it's about, that's how it feels like: the world seems to have changed, but it hasn’t; it's the same.

Who has changed is him.

So…?

He tries to get up, but his chest burns. He feels exhausted, as if he didn’t have a single drop of energy. With a dry throat and eyes hypnotized by the space that surrounds him, he breathes with difficulty. It feels like it bothers him. The same feeling gives him to blink before the lights.

Only then he notices that he's not alone. Anxious, looks for Kostyantyn, his perfect smile drawn on his sweet lips; who looks at him from the right is a blonde woman with traits that are exotic, with skin as white as snow, smooth and imposing, and dressed in a Motley Crüe shirt that looks more like a dress.

She’s the strangest, but wonderfully beautiful woman, who he has ever seen.

"Welcome to Dark Silence, Nikita Alekseev," she says in well pronounced Ukrainian, but that, for some reason, in spite of her good pronunciation, sounds foreign to him, "nice to meet you."

She smiles at him: how sincere her voice sounds, how warm and pleasant; how transparent are her eyes, full of empathy, of honesty.

"K-Kostyantyn is okay…?" he asks with notorious despair. What weakness he notices in his own voice when speaking.

How terrified sounds his voice, too.

The woman nods.

"You'll see him in a moment: he's fine."

Nikita feels how his chest stop burning. Magically, because he doesn’t know how he’s doing it when he’s so weak, he laughs.

It was the only thing that mattered to him. Kostyantyn and that wound that he had, that bled so much, the one that didn’t allow him to move, that didn’t allow him to escape Kristian's attack.

But how…?

"And who are you…?" he asks the woman with shame. Talking hurts, hurts a lot; he feels his voice rumble in a void that’s inside of him, right on his back.

"You can call me Mother. I’m the founder of Dark Silence, the largest _shadow_ community in the world."

Mother? The memories attack him with incipient ferocity: Kristian had treated her as a liar, but Kostyantyn had defended her passionately. He had even told him that she loved him without knowing him, that he was dying to present them.

And he called her in Ukrainian, _mama_ , not _mother_ in English; he mentioned her each time with an indescribable tenderness in his voice.

"Am I a _shadow_ …?" he asks, and yes, how exhausted he is.

Sinking in the deepest fear, he feels that his soul returns to his body when Mother nods.

"One of the most beautiful I've seen," she answers; in her eyes there's an intense, real emotion. "Kostyantyn turned you, but we'll talk about that later. Now, Nikita, I need to ask you some questions."

He nods, touched despite the weakness; in shock, though relieved in some strange way.

He's a _shadow_ , then…

Mother squeezes his hand, but he cannot stop staring at her eyes. He looks at them so much that, for a moment, he realizes that he almost doesn't blink when he does so. He doesn’t do it, not with the usual frequency.

She doesn't do it at all.

"How do you feel?"

"Weak."

"Do you feel some kind of need?"

Nikita responds with such spontaneity that he’s surprised at himself:

"I'm… thirsty."

She leans a little closer to him. Nikita notices that she’s sitting to the right of his hip.

"I guess you don’t know, but to be turned into a _shadow_ , that is, for the procedure to work, there must be conviction in you; that predisposes your energy, allows you to accept the energy you receive from the blood of the _shadow_ that turns you. So… Why did you accept that Kostyantyn turned you?"

He responds by inertia; he doesn't need to think about that question.

For days and days, he has the answer.

"Because I didn't want to be human anymore."

"Why not?"

He also has the answer, thought to a sickly point for so many nights, with his eyes fixed on him, in Kostyantyn's unequal tones, lying before him in bed, whispering songs against his lips, cold fingers on his trembling skin. 

"Because the human life I had it had nothing to offer me."

Mother frowns.

"And what do you think that changes when you become a _shadow_?”

He tries to smile. He’s so weak that he doesn’t know if he succeeds or not.

He feels that he does so, however.

"I’ll be able to continue doing what I like, doing it without worrying about anything than enjoying it, and also I’ll be able to share it with him…"

He fixes his eyes on Mother's with all the emotion that his own words produce, words so well thought out for so long, at last uttered aloud.

It’s beautiful, to say it it’s beautiful.

Mother's eyes seem to shine more, they do it for a moment. Nikita feels how she squeezes his hand even more.

"I think you and I will get along very well, Nikita."

He tries to smile in response. Apparently, he succeeds, because Mother returns a smile that allows him to see her huge white fangs.

How beautiful she is. How beautiful she looks now, being what both are.

"So… Are you thirsty?"

"Yes…"

"Are you aware of what it means to be a _shadow_ and to be thirsty?"

He has thought so much about that. The last weeks, so much.

"Should I drink blood?"

"Yes, Nikita. How do you feel about that? For some _shadows_ , when are turned, the idea causes rejection. You know: they have a romantic idea about what it means to be a vampire because of all the inaccurate fiction that exists about us, they idealize it to the point where they forget that we only feed on humans and other _shadows_ , which, in turn, plunges them into disenchantment."

He shakes in the place where he continues lying down. He only wants to give the complete answer to Kostyantyn.

"I suppose that… those are the rules of the game," he just says.

Mother kisses his right cheek, she does it with some kind of urgency. He feels how a cold breath hits his skin.

"I really like you, Nikita," she says. "Close your eyes."

He closes them reluctantly; he feels that she hypnotizes him to the point where he doesn't want to look at anything else, no, never more.

How will it be to look at Kostyantyn for the first time with these different eyes that make reality so different?

Something similar to a plastic bottle rests on his lips and presses against his skin; he opens his mouth after hesitating for a moment.

He doesn't wait what happens.

He feels a cold liquid touching his tongue; just tasting it makes him shiver; later, when the liquid fills his mouth, he feels how a powerful overdose annihilate the whole of his being. It's like an explosion at the epicentre of his life, like a fire spreading in all directions, infecting him with warmth, burning him, transforming him; that liquid gives him, just by touching his tongue, the most intense, heart-breaking and insanely delicious sensation of pleasure that he has ever experienced.

It’s ecstasy. Different from art, emotions, physical pleasure.

It’s the ecstasy of something he doesn't understand yet.

Of the _shadow_ , not of the human.

After swallowing, he sighs, and he doesn't have time to feel embarrassed to behave like that before that strange vampire; he doesn't care, there's no way.

It’s an unbearable intensity, as unbearable as it’s perfect, and sighing becomes, soon, imperative.

One second later, when he feels the supernatural pleasure spreading through his body, burning his veins with the wildest fire, he also feels how a torrent of energy electrifies his heart, of such power that he sits down wherever he is. In doing so, he opens his eyes holding his chest: he sees that Mother is next to him on a stone platform covered with a white sheet, and that his body is covered by rose petals as red as blood.

Blood, precisely. What he sees in his fingers when he licks his lips not before touching them, something he does without being aware of his actions, because he needs it, just like that.

Blood has given him that sublime sensation.

Blood.

Is this right?

He responds instantly, surprised at how he feels:

Yes, it is.

"I know," Mother says; she seems tender, as if looking at a baby, "the first time is sublime."

"I'm still thirsty…" he responds with total naturalness. It’s as if what he says doesn't correspond to what he feels, as if the concepts that he has always been known about life, death, love and pleasure would have been reformulated.

Mother sighs.

"Nikita, you had the decision _very_ well taken; I'm surprised. I can’t find an explanation for how well you have taken this. Only those who really know what they want can take it like this."

He looks at her. When Mother squeezes his hand again, he trembles at the feeling that she transmits, a sense of joy that is capable of crushing him in a second.

"I gave you a very powerful blood, from a very old _shadow_ : they are the ones that feed the most. You are a new born and that implies that your body needs to mature as a _shadow_ , which means that you’ll have to drink _a lot_ of blood in your first days. Then, you can live with a human victim every week. In a few months or a year, you can live with two a month, and then with one, and then with one every two months. The more mature the _shadow_ , the less blood needs. If you and Kostyantyn become companions, you can also opt for… _other_ ways of feeding, but he’ll explain that part to you.” In the end, she laughs mischievously. "Now, please, take off your shirt."

Nikita retreats; shyness fills him without effort.

"For what?"

Mother laughs.

"Easy: I’ll not get involved with my son's love interest; I just want to see your wound."

"My… My wound…"

He remembers it: Kristian had pierced him with that strange wide and fine dagger; the dagger pierced his body, from his back to his chest.

Not without shyness, he unbuttons his shirt and, instead of taking it off, he only slides it down his arms, enough to show his back and chest.

Mother stands up. Nikita feels a cold hand on his back as he looks at his own chest: he has no wound.

He’s paler than he has ever been seen himself.

Stunned, he fills with questions; Mother's caress slows his voice. Her hand is cold, but her cold generates no rejection in him.

Her cold, he says to himself without understanding what he refers to, it feels as warm as the fire that runs through him inside.

"It healed," she says behind him. She sits again at the place she was on the beginning and she gives him a chill as she slides her sharp nails painted red across his chest in a caress full of emotion, of tenderness despite the intimate that, for some reason, it feels. "Is hardly notice a little on your back, very little. In a few days, with the right diet, you'll be like new."

"Then…" he whispers when he understands, "the wound that Kostyantyn had, the wound that he had…?"

Mother looks at him with surprise. Nikita, for some reason, feels that she doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

"I don't know what are you talking about," she confirms from one second to the other, forcing a smile, "but if you say that Kostyantyn was hurt, then it was because of your blood that he recovered."

His blood. That prick in the neck, that prick that he barely felt because of the fog that with its density drowned him in a deep darkness.

"Blood heals wounds in vam… _shadows_."

"Yes, Nikita." Mother looks at him with her eyes so happy that he feels happy just by looking at her. How do those eyes to be so expressive? "It's blood what feeds us and what heals us, the only one that keeps our bodies alive."

"And why are you so happy?" he inquires, overwhelmed with information and sensations. He hugs himself when he feels a new chill. He arranges his shirt with urgency in his gestures.

It's as if, from one second to the other, he heard a thousand cries and a thousand laughs at the same time, sounding in unison, all trapped in the expressive eyes of that strange but beautiful vampire.

"Soon, you’ll know everything you need to know, I promise."

She releases him. He feels how she cleans his lower lip with a finger just before retiring without saying another word.

Alone, he lets himself fall on the platform: he's weak, again. Is it because he wants blood? Is thirst so unbearable, that it’s as if he couldn’t bear to be alive?

Is he alive? Is _alive_ the word that defines him?

Where is Kostyantyn…?

 

**…**

 

He contemplates them; all are grey, but not because they are, but because that's how he feels them.

Like the piano, all grayscale.

Artem, Jandiara and Alva speak next to him, all before the door of the chapel. They say something about traveling to another country, that Ukraine can be dangerous for the perceptive, according to Mother, and that it will be better to go to another Dark Silence headquarters, and that maybe they could go to Romania, Poland, even cross the Black Sea and go to Turkey.

"Or we could go to Belarus," Artem comments. "The highest authority in the country is in Minsk, she's an old friend, she was part of Mother's entourage about eighty years ago."

Belarus? But…

Having to leave Ukraine like this, have to run.

He feels that Artem looks at him at the precise moment when, on the other side of the door, an unknown energy is easily perceived. He smiles; Kostyantyn looks down.

Because everything looks grey.

Because that energy and the intoxicating warmth it transmits is more than he deserves for having allowed things to be that way.

Artem shakes his head, denies at the air. Kostyantyn frowns when he senses his annoyance.

How does he expect him to react to the beauty of the energy that fills the air, if it didn't have to be this way, if Nikita had to remain human, if his voice was deserved by everyone…?

"I'll talk to Hanna. I think Belarus is a good option. Alva, join me."

She, always so sweet, nods, and walks behind Artem with the purest calm reigning in her features. Only Jandiara is left.

"Spoiled child," she whispers.

Kostyantyn looks at her: what an exuberant woman, with a beautiful dark skin, always with her leather clothes and her curly hair. She looks at him in a way that Kostyantyn doesn't remember in her eyes, not in thirty-two years.

He doesn't answer. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees her smile. Jandiara crosses her arms with her back against the wall.

"Come here."

Kostyantyn turns completely towards her.

"What?"

Jandiara moves with agility, what is expected in an eighth-level warrior, the most powerful _shadows_ as far as physical strength is concerned: she drags him before her.

"Do you want blood?"

Kostyantyn tries to break free of the grip that Jandiara holds firmly on his right arm; he cannot.

"I want nothing," he answers with explicit annoyance.

She keeps looking into his eyes.

"I thought the same thing, that after emptying her to turn her I wasn’t going to need more blood, but I found myself in a chapel very similar to this, the one in Stockholm, without enough blood. I mean, I had the blood I needed, but not the blood I wanted to give her. Alva deserved more; I deserved Alva."

Kostyantyn wasn't with Mother's entourage at that time, more than twenty years ago; he was in Canada with Artem studying languages. Mother has told him what happened: Jandiara met Alva a few months before turning her: she was the older sister of a terminal patient who asked Dark Silence, through a contact at the hospital where she was treated, to take her from the world before the months that lay ahead. Jandiara was the chosen one: she took her but not before being amazed by the beauty of the sisters. Alva cried in Jandiara's arms the entire night.

Both became friends, talked about a thousand and one things, they frequented more than the prudent between a human and a _shadow_ during the stay of Mother and her entourage in Sweden, bonded by Alva’s deep pain. They were different; Maybe, that had been the key.

Dark Silence controls the spread of _shadows_ in a kind of birth control. Quiet often, the _shadows_ that receive the gift do so out of love. Because Mother hasn't lied to him: everyone goes through that sooner or later, falling in love with a human and that this decide to be turned so that the relationship can continue.

Jandiara offered it to her, Alva accepted; at the Stockholm headquarters, she turned her, and they haven't separated since then.

They are a very, very beautiful couple.

"I'm fine like this," Kostyantyn responds looking at the grip she keeps on him.

Because he's not stupid: he understands what Jandiara is trying to tell him.

She deserved Alva; he doesn't deserve Nikita.

And if he hates him…

Jandiara bites her wrist. She shows it to Kostyantyn: blood flows from her.

"Go, take a little. I'm not as old as Mother, but I'm older than you."

Kostyantyn tries to let go again; Jandiara laughs.

"No… I don't…" Kostyantyn murmurs; he cannot stop looking at the wrist.

Mélovin wants that blood.

Jandiara caresses his cheek.

"You're underestimating that Nikita. If he's a perceptive as strong as Alva has concluded, I can assure you that he'll be happy to be a _shadow_."

Kostyantyn watches her on the verge of feeling offended.

"Why do you say something like that if you don't even know him?”

"Take a little bit of me and I'll explain it to you. Come on, spoiled child: let me spoil you for the first and the last time."

Kostyantyn tries to stop, but Mélovin, hungry, agrees: he holds Jandiara's arm without her releasing him, in turn; he drinks from her, slowly, and feels ashamed for hearing her gasp.

That's why he hates to drink from other _shadows_.

It's the first time he drinks from her: the only thing he can perceive in her blood is passion. The sensation, of course, makes him even more uncomfortable.

"The perceptive are the spiritual _shadows_ ," Jandiara explains with a slight agitation in her voice. He notices that she tries to hide it, which, somehow, softens Kostyantyn in the middle of so much discomfort. "They feel all the energy that flows around them, they understand it, they analyse it. They are those who, when were humans, were sensitive people, people with a different ability to understand the details that others can’t notice. Their ability to understand how energy flows from the emotional makes them, when they are convinced of something, to know the answer in their hearts: they are honest _shadows_ , the kindest." She urges him to move away. Kostyantyn obeys not without fighting with Mélovin for taking control. Jandiara kisses her wound and the two small holes opened by her own teeth close instantly. "They are excellent companions, because what makes them weak in the face of persuasives is, at the same time, their greatest virtue: they cannot lie; they know how to love."

Jandiara releases him; Kostyantyn observes her without observing her. So many things have happened, there’s so much feeling and information scrambled in his head, and nothing reigns in him more than the blame for having turned him, for having to turn him in such a situation.

Because he had to watch him die for of his clumsiness, because if he had saved him, then…!

"When you take Nikita's blood, he’ll not know how to lie: you’ll see clearly that, if he has become one of us, it’s because he wanted to. They don't play games, they cannot play; they know why they decide what they decide, because they have an understanding about their own energy and the energy of the other that doesn’t let them doubt. They are the _shadows_ that adapt best; we all know. Drink from him and you’ll give me the reason."

"And why are you telling me this?"

Jandiara massages her wrist with her back still resting on the wall.

"Because Artem spoils you too much, even more than Mother."

Artem? Maybe he…?

Kostyantyn doesn’t have time to ask: Mother leaves the chapel, leans on the door when closing it and smiles with an immeasurable emotion in her eyes.

"He already woke up," she says, and how radiant is her smile. "Almost four hours: it took less than expected."

Kostyantyn looks at her without words, too entangled in his emotions to understand what is happening.

Mother hugs him.

Kostyantyn sinks his face into her shoulder. She squeezes him like a mother who has just given birth, moved. And she is; Kostyantyn feels it in her arms.

“Easy, honey…” Holding him by the waist, Mother urges him to break the hug. They look at each other again, and he still cannot speak. She smiles at him and it's almost unbearable to have her in front of him. "You aren't ready for how beautiful he is as a _shadow_ ," she announces between laughs. "And you're not prepared for how comfortable he is with his condition."

The latter bursts like a bomb in his conceptual heart.

Jandiara laughs behind them.

"What are you trying to say with that?" Kostyantyn asks.

"That he had the decision taken before. That is to say: you didn't force him, my love. Nikita was so well decided to become a _shadow_ that the fact he didn't tell you before what happened has only been a sad coincidence." She holds his hands, kisses them; Kostyantyn fails to escape the shock that holds back all his reactions. "Go with him. He's so perfect that I’ll regret very much not being able to see your face when you know him as a _shadow_ , but I must give you your privacy." Mother approaches Jandiara but not before winking at Kostyantyn, who feels the most intolerable heat in his eyes. Because he wants to cry, because he wants to throw himself to the floor and cry. "Don't forget the habit: he's hungry. I gave him a bit of cold blood so that his wound closes completely, but he’ll be very hungry for a few days. And he feels a lot, he perceives everything. Have a little patience; surely, he’ll be stunned for a few hours."

Without further ado, she smiles at him for the last time, takes Jandiara by the arm and retires with her.

"In four hours, it dawns! Come and see us after feeding, we’ll be in my room; I’ll play some songs to relax the atmosphere. Then, make him turn off with you; _papa_ will spend the hours of sun with _mama_." she yells laughing at the distance.

Overcome physically, mentally and emotionally, Kostyantyn just laughs. What else can he do, after so much? After watching him die, just before knowing him as a _shadow_.

Feeling the beauty of his energy as if it were his voice, his warm voice demanding him to rediscover him.

Nothing, nothing he can do more than open the door of the chapel. He does, and he doesn't look up until he closes the door behind his back. Reality shocks him with a power that makes his legs tremble; his conceptual heart is melted by the fire that his feelings unleash.

No, he wasn't ready.

Sitting on the edge of the platform that is at the top of some stairs, with white and red lights pointing at him and a sepulchral silence tensing the air around him, Nikita looks at him with tears of blood running down his cheeks. Around him, all the colours of the world are displayed at once.

He doesn't deserve him.

Kostyantyn walks slowly, without blinking, but breathing agitated; his steps, slow ones, resound throughout the room. It’s as if something else moved him, as if a magnet attracted him; he feels Nikita a kind of ghost, and tears fall when he remembers, without stopping staring at him, the image of death.

How far away he feels it when Nikita's mouth gives a hint of a smile.

When he reaches the bottom of the stairs, Kostyantyn takes a moment to observe him from below, to worship him as if he were some kind of god: his skin is paler, it's like silk, it looks so soft, and his eyes look brighter. His hair, even more curly than when he was human, seems a little darker.

There's something in him that, turned, has become sweeter, more boyish. Are his eyes, is his skin, are his curls? No: it's something else.

It's peace.

Nikita threatens to get up; tears paint in red his face.

"No," Kostyantyn begs. "You are weak, don't get up yet."

The simple request plunges Nikita into a deep hypnosis. He extends a hand towards Kostyantyn.

He’s desperate.

"Then come, please…"

The new image is of a beauty so supreme, so perfect, so sweet and ethereal and angelic, that Kostyantyn soon feels a computer. He throws the image of death to the recycle bin, because he doesn't need it anymore, and jumps the ten steps with astonishing ease.

Smiles; he smiles so much that he feels his face gets deform, that his teeth gnash, that his eyes fall.

He has never been so happy, never in life; he never felt a happiness so little deserved.

Nikita, still sitting on the edge of the platform, opens his legs and arms in a movement that costs him; it can tell he's exhausted. Kostyantyn wipes his own tears with his fingers, which tremble like never before.

Never, in the damn life, neither in the human life nor in _shadow_ life, has he seen such an intolerably perfect image.

It's the most perfect image, because it’s Nikita turned into a _shadow_.

It's Nikita with him, as eternal as he is.

Being the same as him.

"Niki…" he sighs, and feels how the fire burns inside.

How much he loves him.

Nikita frowns; Kostyantyn, who remains in front of him without emitting sound, transmits a sadness that seems to detach from him and infect him; he feels how Kostyantyn has that sadness interspersed with a joy, a desire, an indescribable gratitude.

"Why are you sad too?"

Kostyantyn's eyes open wider. Nikita is a perceptive, there is no doubt.

Because he feels that sadness too, he notes. He feels it, together with happiness.

A second, and Kostyantyn embraces him with an irrepressible vehemence. He doesn't know what to say, he doesn't know what to feel.

He talks without realizing it, because any reason, because he needs it.

Because he can, finally:

"Forgive me! I didn't want it to be like that, you didn't deserve something so horrible, to be hurt that way, to be turned with that haste and that clumsiness that I’ll never forgive myself. I'm really sorry… Please forgive me!"

Nikita embraces Kostyantyn with forces that he doesn’t know, that are supernatural, that are honest: he cannot bear to see him tremble like that, cry like that. Now he understands everything, even that diffuse image in the fog.

"Did Kristian force you to be a _shadow_?"

"Yes…"

"How? If the conviction…" he asks, but he feels the answer beating in his chest; he perceives it, and by perceiving it he knows it from one second to the other.

When Kostyantyn responds, all he does is confirm it:

"He told me that if we were the same, we could be together forever…"

He convinced him by taking advantage of his feelings, then. He convinced him not to be a _shadow_ , but to love him beyond his human life.

When he swears to see the guilt in the deep oceans of his unequal eyes, when Nikita sees the guilt as if it were an independent being to Kostyantyn, everything becomes evident.

"It wasn't the same with me, Kostya. Don't think that," he begs.

Kostyantyn, who cries more and more red tears, shakes his head.

"I can't."

Nikita exerts force on him; he squeezes him with his arms and legs, still desperate, without bearing his pain. He feels it! He feels the pain hitting him against the chest, he feels it surround him, hang him, pull his eyes so that he cries the same sadness that Kostyantyn cries.

He feels how pain passes through him and belongs to him.

Is it because he's a _shadow_ that he perceives it to this point?

"I'm happy…" Nikita says with the little energy he has, more desperate than ever to do something, to make Kostyantyn not suffer anymore, to make that joy that he feels reigns, to win the battle.

Kostyantyn looks into Nikita's eyes, looks at him like looking directly at the sun.

"Me too," he responds, and hugs him, and cries and lets him cry against him. "Me too…"

The sun that dissociates the _shadow_ and the human. That's Nikita.

That he will be.

"Don’t be sad then, don't feel guilty."

"But…"

"Please…"

Nikita squeezes him a lot. Apparently, he does it in excess, because Kostyantyn launches a groan. Feeling that he has a force that he cannot control, Nikita takes him away from him, takes him face with extreme delicacy, looks at him with all the love he feels.

"I decided it a long time ago, even before I met you: I no longer wanted the life I had. I wanted something different, something that didn't make me unhappy, that didn't make me feel alone, that didn’t condemn me to an inertia that would end up killing me like it was doing when you met me. I thought a lot and… Kostya, my way of being happy has always been to sing; if being a vampire or _shadow_ or whatever they are called allows me to sing and also be with you, with who has filled me with hope and has helped me to recover the strength to sing and to exist, then why do I want my human life?"

Kostyantyn denies again and again.

"But… But you deserved something else! You deserved that many people listen to you…”

Nikita laughs. Kostyantyn has never seen him laugh like that. It's almost arrogant what he transmits.

"Why do I want a lot of people to listen to me, if I only care that you listen to me…?”

What Mother had said: that thing about the numbers was true; the numbers mean nothing.

Only artists know what their ideal Wembley is.

Kostyantyn hugs him by the neck; Nikita is still on the platform, they are equal in height. The words are so ideal that it hurts; it hurts to feel that this is a dream and that he will awake soon. Because he doesn't want to! He never wants to wake up.

Snow, Ukraine, Nikita and peace. Or better yet: snow, Odessa, Nikita and peace. And a thousand songs that he will inspire him, and a thousand songs that, with luck, he will also inspire.

He doesn't need anything else.

"Do you forgive me, anyway?” he says almost touching his eyes with his eyelashes, too close to him, incredulous, not knowing if he’s real.

Is he?

Nikita laughs: Kostyantyn had never seen him so happy, nor so beautiful, nor so radiant.

Convinced to that point, never.

"There’s nothing to forgive."

Then, Kostyantyn knows it, he does it when Nikita's eyes, which no longer blink, which have already adapted to not need it, stare at him.

"Why do you love me so much?"

Because that is: Nikita loves him. That feels when looking at him, that energy his eyes allows him to read, energy in the form of a feeling, of a light even stronger than the sun.

Nikita laughs again; he's radiant, yes, he is because he’s a _shadow_.

For being with him without more secrets to keep, finally.

He nods. What peace he transmits. Kostyantyn needs to be infected with that peace.

"Because you are you, and because of that you haven’t let me give up."

Kostyantyn feels how something changes inside him: the fire stops burning him; it only slides through his veins, only keeps them lit with life, with energy, with warmth. Because fire is like water, in him, and the deep ocean of his eyes is where all his feelings are, and in the deepest of his conceptual heart is the reason why Nikita has changed everything.

He isn't alone anymore.

He isn’t.

Everything that should have been thirty-two years ago, everything that wasn’t because of a miserable persuasive, found in the sweetest face of the universe. It wasn't as he wanted, but time and pain, but fury and blindness, and the silence, and the vampiric mask, have taken him towards the promised destiny with astonishing wisdom.

Soon, he understands, in a powerful epiphany, that everything has been for something, that not one detail has been left to chance.

If it was about reaching this perfect instant, the moment when to love Nikita is possible and it's okay, then everything, even the most horrible, has been worth it.

Even, he discovers when he throws on his chest, and cry, and shout "thank you" without voice, between tears, being turned into _shadow_ has been worth it. Because if he hadn’t been what he is, he would never have known him, not like that, not like this.

"I love you," he says crying and smiling, possessed, because it’s no longer necessary to swallow anything.

Nikita combs him, holds him close to his chest containing himself, gently, with hands that tremble for joy and weakness, for the confirmation of what he so clearly perceives.

"Me too," he responds, and how obvious is everything. And how perfect by being obvious, and how ideal by being theirs, theirs and no one else.

They remain embraced, feeling each other; Kostyantyn feeling Nikita’s emotion, Nikita overwhelmed by the complex emotional framework that composes Kostyantyn. He will not stop feeling guilty in five minutes, he will need time to adaptation, he seems to have more than one bloody wound in some corner of his heart. Nikita nothing craves more than help.

Than erase the pain he perceives and fill him with light.

Little by little, he feels how Kostyantyn, with his face buried on his chest, stop crying. Nikita doesn't know it, but it’s his energy, the intense feeling that his energy transmits, the one who relaxes him.

It's wonderful.

"I feel everything you feel as if I felt it."

Kostyantyn smiles between sobs when he hears Nikita.

"You’re a perceptive: I'll explain what it means later, but that’s why you feel that way, because you perceive in detail my energy."

Nikita nods. He still doesn't know anything, not even the most superfluous details. But something inside him requires him to see it from another perspective: maybe he can do this with anyone from today, to feel what others feel so intensely, but he refuses to believe that he feels Kostyantyn at this level only because of that talent they are talking about so much, that of perception.

He feels Kostyantyn because is Kostyantyn, because he loves him, because of the feelings that are reflected with sickly accuracy in each other's eyes.

Smiles while combing him; yes, with that version he will stay.

It's because of him, not talent.

It's because of him, because of everything that he means to him.

Kostyantyn leaves his chest, where so many tears have left. His eyes are red and swollen, but even like this his beauty isn't affected. He looks beautiful, more vulnerable, not so indestructible.

More human than ever.

With his _shadow_ 's eyes, Nikita only sees what he already knew, but with more clarity.

Kostyantyn is wonderful, the most wonderful being he has ever seen.

He asked himself a thousand questions while stroking his hair with his fingers: being _shadow_ has to do with energy, but how? What is the reach of his supposed talent as perceptive? What other skills does he have for being what he is now? Kostyantyn has shown him everything he can do or…?

He cannot think anymore; his eyes weigh him, his hands too. A dizziness shakes him and he falls against Kostyantyn's chest, who tightens him with all the love that comes from his heart.

"You're weak," he says in a whisper. There is a beautiful smile on his lips.

"Yes…"

"You need to… feed."

Nikita, with his face resting on Kostyantyn's chest, barely looks up, enough to stare at him: he looks nervous, suddenly.

He caresses the face against his chest. He feels nervous, too.

He nods. Kostyantyn holds his face with his hands, strokes his cheeks with his thumbs, looks at him as fixed as Nikita has looked at him.

"Listen…" he says, serious. Nikita notices him boyishly, on one hand; on the other, he feels him convinced, serious, mature. How such different sensations can be so balanced in him? "You still don't know anything about what it means to be a _shadow_. I guess _mama_ told you a bit, but…"

Nikita nods.

"Very little, it's more what I don't understand than what I understand," he confesses, and how he weighs him the voice, once more.

"You lost a lot of blood because of a mortal wound: it's normal that you woke up as a _shadow_ feeling so weak. It's not the recommended way. It's… important that you feed. But that subject is complex, okay? Humans have a hard time…"

"I'm thirsty."

Nikita says it so naturally that he is amazed at himself, again. Kostyantyn is more surprised than him.

"What do you think about that? What makes you think that you must drink from a human to survive?"

Nikita feels that he weakens even more. He surrounds Kostyantyn's waist with his arms, presses him against him with notorious difficulty; Kostyantyn sticks to his body and holds him against him, still looking at him, still brushing his lips as he speaks.

"I thought a lot about it…" Nikita explains, looking down, "it's the hardest thing to think about, first because you told me almost nothing, second because of course I find it horrible, but…" Exhausted, Nikita puts the right side of his face at one base of Kostyantyn's neck. Does he tremble, or is his energy who does so? "I told myself that maybe it was a matter of nature, that what as a human seemed horrible to me as a _shadow_ shouldn't look like it. It was enough for me to take the cold blood that Mother gave me to realize that… I was right."

Kostyantyn feels his eyelids open in surprise. He has reasoned it fantastically.

He has taken it better than he would have expected, nothing could be more different from how he had taken it thirty-two years ago.

What Jandiara told him, soon, makes more and more sense: perceptives think things differently, reason differently from others.

They know what they want. They know it because they feel it and because they cannot repress their feelings.

"Besides," Nikita adds, and his voice sounds as weak as his whole body seems to be, "when you told Kristian that in… Dark Silence… you feed on crimi…"

Nikita fades for two seconds. When he comes back to himself, breathes and blinks like the human who he no longer is, until Kostyantyn understands that he cannot stand being as he is, sitting on the edge of that platform, thirsty.

Without saying anything to him, doing it without further ado, Kostyantyn takes him in his arms, places him on the platform and sits next to him, just as, without he knows it, Mother received him when he woke up.

"Everything turned off…" Nikita says, agitated, looking at Kostyantyn with sleepy eyes.

"We'll talk about what _turn off_ means later." Kostyantyn caresses his chest with an open hand on him; he never stops smiling, he does it even with some coquetry. "Now, I must teach you how to feed yourself."

"Is it like in the movies? Do we seduce a criminal and kill it between us?” Nikita laughs, how absurd is what he just said.

"No, Niki. Not for now." Kostyantyn slides the hand from the chest to the neck, from the neck to the cheek, from the cheek to the mole below the right eye which, on the pale skin, continues looking beautiful. "Your first victim will be me."

Nikita feels how a torrent of warmth expands through his body. It’s as if the simple suggestion activates a part of his instinct that he doesn't known. He discovers that the idea, somehow, it excites him besides infecting him with an inexplicable emotion.

Feeling seduced by the thought, he trembles on the platform, nervous.

"What?"

The nervousness doesn't let him understand, not with the previous clarity, what Kostyantyn's energy transmits; is the weakness, rather, that agent that doesn't allow him to concentrate on anything. Overwhelmed by everything he doesn't understand, by this unexpected answer, he feels how he's agitated by uncertainty.

Kostyantyn, softened by his reaction and nervous for that continues, leans over him and kisses the mole: Nikita is no longer thrown back by the contact of the warmth of his human body with the cold of the vampiric lips; they are the same.

He contains a sigh at the thought, and feels that his chest gives a turn that expands the warmth even more.

"It's the habit," Kostyantyn explains calmly; inside of him, the revolution of emotions is intolerable. “In Dark Silence, we have some rules of behaviour, ones that I’ll detail later. When it comes to feeding new born _shadows_ , we tend to feed them with other _shadows_ the first days. After that, when they understand how to feed, when they know how to use their ten talents, their special one and the basic ones (this is hard to explain, but I’ll only tell you that you saw almost nothing of what we can do), we ask them to feed on criminals, sick and volunteers. The latter is a kind of agreement we have with the government. Maybe it sounds a little creepy, it sounds like that to me, if I'm honest, but it's…"

As he can, because he's exhausted, Nikita holds his hand with which he gives him caresses on the mole. With narrowed eyes, dizzy than ever, he takes the word as it comes out, weakly:

"I think I can get used to this. Maybe, being a perceptive it helps me to understand. I'm still happy to be with you…"

Kostyantyn feels, soon, how amazement hangs him. Nikita is so convinced, but so much, that it seems a lie. How can he assimilate so quickly things with which he still has serious problems? So clear he has it, with such astonishing ease, that fighting against his instinct and nature has no meaning?

He notices how he fades again, how he loses him for three seconds. He can delay the situation no longer.

He has to do it.

He climbs onto the platform, sits between Nikita's legs and picks him up by the waist. He sits him on his thighs with ease, as if Nikita were one petal (he is) while he looks at him more asleep than awake.

"Hold my neck," Kostyantyn asks him in a voice that trembles more of what he would like.

How nervous he is. How much has this always cost. Feeding is his most serious problem, with which he has most conflicts.

The reason why Mélovin exists in the darkest part of his conceptual heart.

Nikita, feeling the seduction that the whole scene suggests, under such dim lights and surrounded by so many petals, astride Kostyantyn in the middle of the platform, with his legs tangled around his waist, like a lover, he discovers how much his body trembles. Even weakness doesn't stop him: he trembles profusely.

It sounded easier of what has ended up being. Or not: it's not about the idea of drink from Kostyantyn; it's about what he just understood.

They will be able to intimate.

They will be able to intimate, and just for thinking about that he wants to cry out of joy. It's not what matters the most, but with Kostyantyn it does feel important. It's the idea of expressing what he feels, to tell him how much he loves him with kisses, caresses, warmth, what excites him.

A warmth that annuls the cold that reigns in their bodies, that arises from the excessive intensity of their feelings.

"Niki, I'm going to teach you everything, okay? Everything: to feed, to turn off, to use a large part of your powers. Alva, a perceptive of eighth level, will teach you to control your perception in more detail. But I’ll be the one who educates you."

Why does the idea seduce him so much?

What does it mean all these strange instincts that tear his skin from the inside?

"Okay…" he whispers almost without a voice.

He cannot tell everything else, not perceiving, although without the clarity of the beginning, the emotion that overwhelms Kostyantyn, one that his unequal eyes transmit with overwhelming power.

"You can trust me, I know many things and I’ll work hard."

Why does even that seduce him? He has already noticed how intelligent Kostyantyn is, he has also noticed that he can become presumptuous when it comes to demonstrating his knowledge. There is something childish about it, it used to have it during those nights in bed talking about a thousand and one things, but today, now, something is different. Before. It was tender, because Kostyantyn behaved like a teenager.

Now, he notices him scared, nervous, too moved to remember to brag or seduce. That, in a way, gives him the desire to protect him.

But it seduces him anyway. The tenderness that he feels seduces him, the idea of being his apprentice seduces him.

The idea of loving him seduces him.

Too much.

"It's okay…"

How weak he is. When he feels how everything fades around him again, seduction loses its place; he feels nothing, absolutely nothing, more than darkness. When he comes to himself, in front of his eyes he has Kostyantyn's neck, who holds him by the waist with one arm and by the back with the other.

"You have to do it as soon as possible," he listens to what he says. "Look at me, I'll explain how."

His hands reach his cheeks: Nikita, face to face with Kostyantyn, looks at him with the eyes still dizzy. Breathes with difficulty, he does it over his mouth.

He perceives, in a flash, how nervous Kostyantyn is, evidenced by how he breathes on him too.

"Why are you nervous?" Nikita asks just like that.

Kostyantyn sighs with difficulty; he has a lump in his throat. Realizing that both are trembling and that is he and not Nikita who does it the most, he understands why he feels that way.

It's the same as usual.

"I never give my blood to anyone. I-It bothers me…"

Nikita opens his eyes with an overexertion.

"Why?"

They breathe on the other. Kostyantyn releases a nervous laugh.

"When you drink directly from someone, _shadow_ or human, you perceive, by the energy of their blood, a lot of what they feel, what happens to them, what they were and what they are. I've always felt it a kind of invasion; I don't like that people know so much about me, it makes me very anxious to feel so exposed, it makes me nervous, I… I don't like it."

Nikita smiles. He has never been with Kostyantyn in his natural environment, that of the _shadows_ ; discovering his reserve makes him value in another way all the openness he has had to him.

"Why do you want to show me then? Because it's the habit?"

Kostyantyn frowns, anguished. It wasn't his intention, not to express rejection to Nikita.

Not now.

"No, Niki: just… It gives me anxiety. But I'm happy too."

Nikita smiles. Exhausted, he rests his forehead on Kostyantyn's and feels how their hair blends, how one sinks on the other.

"Are you happy because I will feel you?”

"I'm happy because you exist." Kostyantyn rubs his forehead against his; the movement makes that both of them get dishevelled. "And it scares me what you can think of me after feeling me. I guess that's it; with others, I just don't want them to know. But if it's about you…"

Nikita laughs openly.

"Silly…"

Kostyantyn takes him from his face, caresses his cheeks, brushes his lips. He smiles, he does it excessively, and Nikita discovers that he has never seen such a beautiful smile. It's perfect.

It's pure, it hasn't been stained by the world and its cruelty.

"You silly…"

Kostyantyn lets go of his face and points his hands to the front of his own shirt. Unbuttons with grace, but also with something else that Nikita doesn't identify.

Is it shyness?

No.

It's mere vulnerability, an almost teenager one.

He finishes undoing all the buttons: before his eyes, Nikita sees, for the first time, Kostyantyn's cold white skin in the harmonious shapes of his stomach and chest. He's beautiful, he moves him, but he also seduces him to limits that he doesn’t know, because they are related to things he has never experienced.

Not with another man.

Breathing with notorious agitation, Kostyantyn takes off the left arm of the shirt. Keeps the right and, with the other arm, brings Nikita's face to the left base of his neck.

Do vampires have saliva? Nikita doesn't feel something similar in his mouth; it feels dry, which increases his thirst. But it's as if Kostyantyn swallowed saliva. That expresses his gesture.

Yes, it's vulnerability. And it's an angle that he doesn't think he knows from him, not in this kind of context.

Kostyantyn explains to him, pointing to his neck, where he should bite: he recommends the jugular vein, because in case of biting the carotid artery, the haemorrhage will be very violent. Drinking from veins and not from arteries is advisable given the prolixity that any _shadow_ should have in the case of being in front of a human victim. And he says a few more things that, because of how seduced he feels in the physical and also in the emotional, in the latter rather than in the first, he doesn't listen or understand. Something about to suck slowly, something about not to choke, something about to keep the teeth sunk so that the blood doesn't…

"Are you ready?"

He is? It could be said that the _shadow_ it is; in his heart, if it still counts as such in the conceptual, Nikita is overwhelmed. Too many things, all together.

Just a few hours ago he was just a human with a song.

A song…

"If you hear me… making strange noises, well, don't worry. The feeling that they drink from you is very intense and…"

"I know."

"I'm very sorry that Kristian…"

Nikita does, in a second, what he hasn't done yet as a _shadow_ : kisses Kostyantyn's lips by holding his cheeks. It's hardly a touch, he doesn't deepen or extend; he expects to express, with his touch, everything that would be impossible to say.

Kostyantyn looks into his eyes with a fixity almost untenable, moved, scared, pure as anyone ever. Nikita feels older than him as he looks at him.

What tenderness he transmits.

"Don’t feel sorry…"

They laugh over each other's mouths. Kostyantyn feels him too weak. He has to hurry him.

But…

"Here, then…" he says when pointing out the jugular vein on the left side of his neck.

Nikita nods. When Kostyantyn guides him to the vein with the gentle thrust of his hands, the seduction reaches a climax.

The problem is that Nikita doesn't understand why.

He rests his lips on the skin of the neck, just above the vein. Breathes against the cold skin, inhales all the air he can, and the smell of his flesh gives him warmth, and the silent vein gives him warmth, and Kostyantyn complete gives him warmth.

Kostyantyn whispers the indications again, he does so with a trembling voice; Nikita doesn't listen to anything.

He opens his mouth, nails his teeth first with doubt, superficially; then, with surprise: he doesn't need to press too much to pierce, discovers; he does it in a movement thanks to his sharp fangs.

The gasp that Kostyantyn releases makes that everything, except the vein, diffuse around them.

"Slowly…" he hears him saying, suffocated. He doesn't understand the language he speaks. It's Ukrainian, of course he understands, but no, he doesn't. "Go… slowly."

He drinks weakly; the blood reaches his mouth, and is lukewarm, and it's like the most potent of drugs, all at the same time.

He surrounds Kostyantyn’s waist with his arms under the shirt, squeezes, tastes, and the cold turns into warmth.

He moans against the neck, without moving his teeth away from the wound, and when Kostyantyn gasps again the revolution occurs.

He feels him.

With his eyes tight, his body trembling for the pleasure that quench his thirst, Nikita lets himself be trapped by the confused images that are painted in his mind, all at once, exploding over his intangible pupils, those of empathy: a beach, smiles, a piano, pain. Pain, at school, a lot of pain every day, covered by the keys of a lonely piano.

He drinks again: an empty auditorium, a crushing loneliness. Feels how red tears explode in his own eyes, how they struggle to escape between his eyelids.

Loneliness, the exact loneliness.

The same, in both.

He drinks a little more; Kostyantyn gasps again, painfully. It's the same loneliness, the same.

A light in the fog, some sweet hands holding him, some eyes disappearing when all the surrounding lights go out. Sweet voices singing, songs about being oneself, lights blinking in the distance, two names a thousand times pronounced.

 _Mama_.

Artem.

And one censored forever.

Kristian.

Loneliness.

Loneliness, and a sun shining, and two images dissociating. The _shadow_ , the human.

Drinks more, with patience, with enjoyment: it's the same loneliness.

Nothing has been in vain if they have met in this way. Their loneliness, two pieces of puzzle that only with the other could form a coherent image, rediscovered themselves, done it just as their voices have done.

He drinks more; Kostyantyn grunts as he squeezes his waist with a knot formed by his arms. The instincts of what he was, the instincts of what he is; feels, Nikita, love and desire, fear and determination.

He feels in Kostyantyn all that Kostyantyn yearns for in him, all the feeling that he has for him.

He cannot contain the tears anymore: the image that he swears to see in the energy he perceives, that of a sun burning everything around Kostyantyn, moves him to inconceivable points.

The sun is him, he understands.

He drinks more, he squeezes him by wrapping an arm around his neck; Kostyantyn loves him.

He loves him as much as he does.

He doesn't notice that they fall, that Kostyantyn's back collapses on the platform; the sun covers everything. It's the sun that Kostyantyn feels, the one that illuminates him until the obscenest, the one that cleanses with its light the darkness for thirty-two years abandoned.

The end of loneliness, the end thanks to the warmth.

Nikita drinks more, gets lost in the light, lets himself be covered in body and soul so the energy screams; on his side, with his eyes fixed on the ceiling, between gasps that he cannot contain and that embarrass and excite him while the lights blink ruthlessly, Kostyantyn feels that he dies.

Giving blood to another _shadow_ is like tearing off the heart and giving it to the hands of the other, bloody, dark, cold, but alive.

Beating.

Anxiety corrodes him; he doesn't like to give his blood to anyone. Only Artem, and not in excess, in cases of emergency and nothing else. But no: this is different.

To give blood to Nikita, he realizes, despite the shyness that produces to see his conceptual heart naked, it sinks him in a state of daydream that can only be called in a way.

Peace.

He wants Nikita to feel what he feels, to know everything about him. He wants to scream at him, through the energy of his blood, with what compromise he loves him. Because he loves him, and wants him, and needs him.

"Niki…" he whispers between sighs.

He has to stop him; he doesn't want. He hears him cry with emotion between moans that he releases while he drinks, he feels him tremble completely against his body. His coldness feels warm as his body rocks on him.

He wants to give him everything, everything he has in his soul, in his body, in his conceptual heart.

He contains tears when, dizzy and tender, excited and gasping, all mixed, all at once, he knows committed to him. He has never felt a bond of this magnitude.

With nobody, never.

He holds him close by the waist, the one that feels small between his long arms, and he gasps with a smile in his mouth when he feels how a tear fall.

From his blue eye, not the white one.

Kostya will never be alone again.

When he realizes that Mélovin is filling with desire, when he understands that he cannot take this scene further, he stops him not without difficulty. When Nikita releases his neck and sits astride him, he's covering his mouth with one hand, with red tears shining on his eyelids, with the most honest breathing, so hectic, so unnecessary in practice and necessary emotionally.

Nikita is moved, yes. He is.

Making no more noise than that the agitation forces him to release, Kostyantyn takes Nikita's wrist and urges the hand to unclog his mouth. Nikita obeys, lets him remove his hand, and a thread of blood drips down the right corner of his lips.

Kostya and Mélovin smile at the same time, in the same second, when Kostyantyn smiles in the most radiant way representing them.

"You are the most perfect being my eyes have seen, Nikita. Don't ever cover yourself."

Nikita's eyes shine. He has felt so much in taking this blood, he has discovered so many things. He wants to ask so many questions, but nevertheless he remains that way, astride Kostyantyn, who smiles at him with contagious joy.

"As long as you let me," Nikita says with his voice broken in a thousand pieces, undone by the joy that from look to look reigns, "I'll be with you. I’ll always be with you, no matter what." Nikita leans towards him with his legs on either side of Kostyantyn's hip, who clasps him around the waist when Nikita leans on his body. The pose is suggestive, but it's the emotion what triumphs. "Let me be always with you…"

Kostyantyn strokes his cheek with his nose. He smiles against his skin, smiles and contains more and more tears.

"Let me that too."

Kostyantyn's mouth brushes the blood that still lies warm on Nikita's lips. They kiss, they do it in a simple brush, always looking into each other's eyes.

"It was like swimming to the depths of you," Nikita says between rubbing and rubbing, between caress and caress from one mouth to the other. "It was like coming to the most recondite of your being."

His deep water, the inside of his conceptual heart. Of course, Nikita has arrived there.

From the first time he heard him sing he has had the talent to do so.

This, in fact, is nothing new.

They kiss, move their lips against each other's mouths. Nikita feels too seduced, also moved, and doesn't know how to tolerate the supreme harmony that desire and feeling exhibit before him.

Without thinking, unable to think because of how overwhelmed he is, Nikita unbuttons three buttons on his shirt. Kostyantyn looks at him, enraptured.

He will be the best apprentice he can have; Nikita has such a capacity to understand his new instinct that even envy provokes him.

He’s a powerful perceptive.

He's the being with the most immense heart that can exist.

"Feel me too," Nikita asks as he takes him from his face with his hands, as he sits on him and urges him to sits down too. Kostyantyn obeys as if the apprentice were him.

He wants to object, but he cannot.

He needs to feel him. If Nikita loves him, if Nikita offers this him, then maybe he deserves it.

He has drunk from him twice. The first, of a superficial wound on his lip in the middle of an inevitable kiss; the second, in the middle of one of the most traumatic events of his life. This will be the first time that he will really be allowed to enjoy it.

The first time, he waits, of many.

Nikita is gentle, sweet; he treats him like a little boy. Perhaps, Kostyantyn is still that boy.

Perhaps, Nikita treats him like this because of what he perceived when drinking his blood.

He chuckles, his pride shattered, his anxiety a thousand miles per hour, but with a happy heart.

That's what matters.

Kostya’s heart, at last happy.

Nikita runs the fabric of the shirt; Kostyantyn brushes his right ear with his lips.

"First lesson, Nikita Alekseev," agitated by nervousness and emotion, seduced by all that this means, Kostyantyn unleashes, with his breath, a chill on Nikita's frozen body, " _shadows_ find very… sensual the exchange of blood."

Nikita isn't surprised.

"I realized…" he confesses between shy laughs.

"This has a lot to do with our concept of _love_ , that will be my last lesson."

Nikita blinks in surprise: he didn't expect this.

"What do you mean?"

In a swift movement that excites him more than he should, perhaps, and that seduces him by the abruptness, Kostyantyn knocks him down on the platform and leans on him. He speaks against his ear; Nikita trembles for the breath he feels against his skin.

"I mean, when your training is over and you have full capacity to handle all your talents as a _shadow_ , I’ll teach you to love as one."

Love like a _shadow_ …?

"And what it mea…?"

He doesn't ask; Kostyantyn, as fast as before, with the same ease with which he has laid him on the platform, he bites him on the right side of the neck.

Nikita screams in surprise. The next second, a sense of unbearable intimacy fills his veins at the same time he feels a dizziness spins the ceiling that is over them.

It's like being naked in front of the sun, before a crowd with magnifying glasses, examining every corner of his body.

Or not.

Soon, when he feels the blood slide out of him, when he hears how Kostyantyn grunts, and swallows, and sinks his fangs deeper, he discovers that it’s another sensation.

It's like being naked before Kostyantyn, before him and no one else, both under the whitest light.

But this nudity doesn't bother him.

He clings to Kostyantyn's neck with narrowed eyes, feeling how he takes his blood. He gasps, and understands.

Giving his blood is like making love.

Gasps holding back tears, feeling the emotion balanced with passion in a perfect average, seeing all the lights blinking; Kostyantyn receives the sound as a confirmation: Nikita has understood what this act means.

Because yes, it's like making love.

It’s part of what _shadows_ consider making love.

Kostyantyn holds Nikita's waist, descends to his hips, follows his legs, and when his hands slide off his knees, he holds his arms. He rises by them when separating them from him and interlaces the hands, which lie holding each other, in the consequent, on each side of their bodies. And he drinks, he does it slowly, enjoying like Kostya, like Mélovin, like everyone who he is at the same time.

How much he is moved by the loneliness he perceives in his energy, how moved for knowing that soon there will be no signs of it, since they will assimilate this dream they are experiencing, the joy of knowing they are together, of learning to be together, of believing that they are.

He drinks more, he does it one last time: yes, they will believe it soon. Soon, none of that darkness will be in the depths of Nikita's heart.

Nevermore.

He laughs against the neck, retires the teeth and kiss the two wounds. Nikita squeezes his hands.

They look at each other.

Kostyantyn opens his mouth, thinks about to say something, but how impossible. On the other side, Nikita feels the same.

How impossible to stain with words the moment where the eyes of two people speak the same language when contemplating themselves.

With red tears at the edge of his eyes, Nikita kisses Kostyantyn's lower lip, where a tiny drop of blood persists. He smiles at him, and does what he has wanted to do for so many hours, when he was still a human, when he was only a human with a song.

To sing.

To delete the guilt of those unequal eyes, to erase it with the truth of his voice:

" _That is how a dream should feel, when I know your words by heart. A supernatural beauty that drives me crazy_ …" he sings without air, in Russian. He stops to wipe a red tear with a caress of his cheek over Kostyantyn's. " _For me, your eyes are like a height, and I fly high and I have no fear. What will happen if the silence disappeared? Breathe me, breathe me again_ …"

"Niki…"

"Hush…" Nikita holds his cheeks; Kostyantyn holds onto him by resting his hands on either side of his waist. Nikita takes a breath and, with his eyes shining, pearled in a sweet red colour, continues:

" _I’ll be with you forever, forever_ …"

They rest their foreheads one on the other. They laugh without blinking as they cry over each other. Kostyantyn sees how his own red tears mix with those of Nikita on each side of his face. He doesn't care.

It's the most beautiful thing in life, blood coming from both, both being the same.

He doesn't care anymore.

" _We are together_ …" Nikita continues, smiling, crying, " _I’m_ _only with you. With you, you should know, forever_ …"

When finished, Nikita breaks into an uncontrollable crying. Kostyantyn hugs him, kisses him, smiles at him in the most beautiful way.

"Forever, it's a promise," he says touching his lips.

Nikita nods, hugs him too, and the environment fades into the fog that no longer has the power to blind them, and the lights are stained in a thousand colours, blinking all at once, and only the eyes say the rest, everything, everything sung in total harmony, two equally moved voices singing the same song in the pupils.

Many things are happening, maybe a war between _shadows_ comes, but they will fight for the same, for fulfilling that _forever_.

For that ideal scenario, that of tranquillity in their union.

Far from loneliness, at last.

Together, both.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had this chapter ended since almost a week, but this week was... quite strange. Thanks to Blake and Di for perfect words in the perfect moment. :') 
> 
> Thank you both, truly: this chapter it's specially for you. And Memi, for killing me with her words in an unexpected moment the other day; I still can't believe it, you're my hero here. And Jadoremelekseev, of course, because she's... You're the sweetest and I don't know if I would have the courage to keep going with this madness without you. 
> 
> THANK YOU for being with me and my story.
> 
> I can't say "thank you" enough times. So, thank you forever. If you are on the other side, just thank you. :')
> 
> About the chapter, I don't know: it's just what I felt. The last scene was one of the first ideas that I had and pushed me to write this story. It's the main guilty. 
> 
> And the song that Niki sings: it's a free translation (free because I changed a little details) of a part of Навсегда, the Russian version of Forever. That line when he talks about the supernatural beauty and the eyes are a height... So perfect for this story. :') 
> 
> I hope you like it. 
> 
> THANK YOU SO MUCH!!! ♥


	16. XV

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nikita starts to learn about what it means to be a shadow. Meanwhile, he starts to notice some unexpected peculiarities about Kostyantyn.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Forgive me for been almost two months without uploads. Maybe, you forgot about this story, but I will continue to the end no matter what. I'm sorry: it's my fault. 
> 
> If you read, thank you. ♥

"You can redeem yourself, my child."

"How?"

"Bringing Nikita Alekseev to me."

"I will, I will…"

"Even if you have to kill your dear Kostya.”

"I will, I will…"

"Even if you have to kill him, destroy him, pulverize him…”

“I will, my goddess, I will…”

White hands hold his face. Black eyes suck his. Kristian nods; what remains of him it does, actually.

"Bring Nikita Alekseev to me no matter what…"

**.**

**.**

**.**

**XV**

 

Getting out of there it’s hard; neither of them want to leave the chapel, nor do they want to get away from that intimacy so well shared. However, the _shadows_ are at a delicate moment, perhaps anticipating a war. Kostyantyn knows it, and that's why the scene needs to end.

He has a lot to explain to the others.

They walk together, side by side, leaving behind the platform. Kostyantyn holds Nikita's shoulder because of the tremor that shakes his legs as he walks; he's still adapting to the change.

"Be patient," he says calmly, smiling, "you are still mutating, your body is getting used to being a _shadow_ , and that will take time."

Nikita nods. He sighs, overloaded, and holds Kostyantyn's back with a timid hand. They walk very slowly, at the speed that Nikita's legs allow.

"And what does that mean?" Nikita asks, who despite the overload still wants to know more. "What does it mean that my body is getting used to it?"

"Simple: your body is dead." Kostyantyn says it naturally; Nikita cannot help feeling disturbed at the thought. "What lives is the blood that has infected it, the blood that I gave you before you died as a human. Now, your human body is held back in its moment of death, that's why we don't get old; it works with the blood that I gave you like a car thanks to the fuel."

"Am I a car?"

They laugh.

"A beautiful one."

Nikita clings more tightly to Kostyantyn's back. He smiles at him with some weakness.

"So, it's about that only that blood makes my body work at the moment of death…"

"Exactly." Kostyantyn narrows his shoulder: what a pleasure to explain all these things to him; he feels like a child in a toy store. "Before, what you needed was the energy that food provided you; now, it's the energy of the blood that you'll get from humans and other _shadows_. Which means that certain systems of your body no longer work, that they are there without reason, inside you for absolutely nothing, because they no longer have a way to transform and use energy that they don't receive and that, and this is the most important thing, they _don't need_ to receive; it's like to leave a box full of toys abandoned in the middle of an engine: it's useless, but it doesn't interfere either. The systems that continue to function are those that blood provides with energy by circulating through your veins, in a similar way, although with a different logic, how they worked when you were human. In short, you work in a different way; you are another kind of being now, and what is happening to you is that, that you are getting used to this change of logic of your metabolism; that your human body, already dead, acquires another method of survival."

“I get it…”

Nikita is still a little weak, but manages to walk alone when arriving at the chapel’s door. Kostyantyn opens it and invites him to go first. When leaving, they are in the middle of a dark grey corridor.

What it works and what it doesn't work? Nikita is surprised to feel that he reasons faster than he thinks capable; he doesn't know that it's his basic skill as a learner what it helps him, but he does know that he understands it: obviously, if his body is dead, he's not able to create life, which means, perhaps, that he can no longer reproduce as a human. In addition, he no longer needs to consume food to obtain nutrients: everything in his body that’s destined to transform that energy no longer works, or it doesn't do it as before. But his nervous system works, that's why he can move, that's why he can feel. The muscular part remains intact, also the neuronal one, or not: both are stronger now. As well as other things, probably.

Full of information, he sighs once more.

"So…," he says, "where are we?"

Kostyantyn looks at Nikita: he holds his head, dizzy, and observes the surroundings with confusion. He closes the door.

"Under the National Art Museum of Ukraine,” he replies.

Nikita opens more his eyes.

"Seriously?"

Kostyantyn points out to the right, towards where it extends a long way. He advances, and Nikita keeps walking very slowly.

With grace in all his gestures, laughing at the impression that Nikita demonstrates before everything he says, Kostyantyn explains the story of Dark Silence and how they have headquarters under historic buildings on all continents.

"Humans couldn't refuse: we are stronger, and don’t getting along with us would mean putting themselves in danger. That's why we work for them in the shadows, we look for convicts, we kill criminals and we don't reveal ourselves to anyone. In silence, hence our name, and with the premise of not asking in return for anything other than being able to make our lives in peace, we guard the welfare of human society."

Nikita, with his mouth open in surprise, agrees to everything Kostyantyn explains. They keep walking, he keeps explaining things from the most bureaucratic part of the _network_ , but he stops when he realizes that Nikita is overwhelmed.

He must have patience, just as Mother recommended.

Without further ado, he holds his hand and walks with him like this, without letting go of him, taking him along the walk with absolute naturalness.

Nikita looks at the hands: it's the first time they walk like that, like a couple in a corny concept. He gets emotional when thinks about it.

 _Shadows_ don't have foolish prejudices that humans don't exorcise yet, then.

He shakes his hand: he's confused, yes, but also happy.

In silence, enjoys the touch. He continues to feel Kostyantyn's energy, the nervousness, the guilt, but above all the emotion, the joy. They are in shock, both.

But they are convinced too.

Nikita observes the surroundings: the architecture is neoclassical as well as that of the museum, and the grey stone reigns. Galleries demarcated by columns, books in endless libraries, outdated lamps. It's hard to believe that this parallel world exists.

"Usually, every night is full of _shadows_ here, _shadows_ that live somewhere else, among humans, and that use this as a meeting place; _mama_ should have asked them to leave, that's why you see the place so empty."

"Ah…"

How many _shadows_ exist?

At the end of a corridor, an immense wooden door stops them. Kostyantyn looks up and smiles.

" _Mama_ is singing," he says. "Come closer, listen to her."

Nikita looks at the door: he feels his eyes fall from his face.

"She…?"

Kostyantyn’s smile, endowed with an intense emotion, one that only a fan could show before an artist, looks more beautiful than ever.

"She’s my favourite artist in the world," he tells him with pride. "Come on, let's see the end of her song."

They enter, and Nikita cannot believe that Kostyantyn has the strength to move that gigantic door. They move through a space full of things, saturated with colours and shapes, things that Nikita cannot see, that he doesn't understand, that the shock doesn't allow him to assimilate, until they peek out a threshold and, surrounded by people he doesn't know, surely other _shadows_ , they see her: she's standing on a transparent piano decorated by neon lights, with an acoustic guitar hanging from her shoulder by means of a strap, singing and playing at the same time.

" _I’m off the deep end, watch as I dive in… I’ll never meet the ground_ …!" she sings.

Nikita feels how her energy crushes everything, absolutely everything that he's able to perceive in that place. Even Kostyantyn disappears.

She, alone, alone with her voice and her guitar, disappears all the universe around her. And how easy to feel the eyes wet, and how simple to forget his own name. How simple everything when an artist knows exactly how to plunge into a heart.  

But she stops singing when she sees him; when she does, everyone present looks at him at the same time. Surprise is what he captures the most in the eyes, eyes loaded with different sensations, so many that it's impossible to read them, to discern one from another.

He espies on Kostyantyn out of the corner of his eye: how proud he looks.

Of him? Of her? Of both? Of everything?

Nikita looks at Mother: she jumps off the piano without any difficulty, leaves the guitar on the surface of it and runs towards him. With all the confidence, she embraces him. How short she is; she makes him feel tall.

But her energy is the most huge of the room.

"Hi, beauty!"

She releases him, takes him by the hands; Nikita feels that he's going to explode. How intense she is, intense in a charming way.

How could Kristian speak so badly about her, if the beauty of her energy is so noticeable? He cannot think too much, he cannot because of the shock and the energy he perceives around him.

"Do you speak English?" she asks. 

"I don't pronounce very well, but I speak it and I understand it…" he responds in his untidy English, with his eyes pointing at the ground.

"You speak better than Kostyantyn. He speaks like fifteen languages to perfection, but he never manages to pronounce English very well!" Mother says in marked North American accent that Nikita understands perfectly.

They smile tenderly. Nikita sighs almost helplessly.

"You're very stunned, right?" she asks; what empathy shows him. Nikita believes everything to her without effort; even to believe her overwhelms him.

“Quite a lot…”

Mother looks at Kostyantyn without letting go of Nikita's hands, and Nikita feels, in her, a love almost blinded.

Mother loves Kostyantyn as a mother to a son.

"We'll talk about this later, honey," she says to Kostyantyn. The whole conversation continues in English. "It's almost three hours before dawn, it will be better to introduce ourselves and talk about what happened."

Kostyantyn accepts, as serious as Mother shows from one second to the other. 

According to Kostyantyn, as he told him when he got him off the platform in his arms, he didn't tell them anything about what happened with Kristian; apparently, they preferred to wait for him to wake up, although Nikita doesn't understand why. That is to say, now he will find out, with luck, of many things about this mysterious _network_ of _shadows_ of which Kostyantyn is part of.

But before, the presentations:

"Nikita, we don't want to stun you too much, but I'll explain it to you in a simple way," Mother says, taking him by the arm before three women and two men, those who were listening to her sing, who have grouped together in front of the piano. "Dark Silence has headquarters in all the continents, headquarters for which I travel constantly in order to corroborate that everything is going well with the _shadows_ of the world, those that are associated with us. When I travel, I do it with my entourage; they are the _shadows_ that I trust the most. Kostyantyn is part of that entourage, just like them."

Three of the five _shadows_ step forward. Nikita doesn't finish to react to the three powerful energies that he perceives. It's as if three invisible arrows point him at once.

Mother takes him by the arm from left to right: a beautiful brunette woman with uncontrolled, wild curls, extends a hand to him. Nikita accepts the greeting; the force of the tightening produces him a chill. Because she hasn’t squeezed too much; it’s the energy that squeezes it.

"She's Jandiara, from Brazil."

"Nice to meet you, pretty boy. I'm glad you woke up."

Jandiara speaks flirtatiously. Something in her gives him a good impression, makes him feel a very luminous kindness surrounding her; timidly, Nikita smiles at her and nods. She seems somewhat cold, but it's also as if a powerful fire erupted from her pupils. Something in that mixture produces him curiosity. She seems happy, with attitude, full of a passion he doesn't know. 

He approaches to the next _shadow_ ; when he entered the room, taking Mother out, she had been the one that had caught his attention the most.

"She's Alva, from Sweden," Mother says.

She, delicate as an angel painted in the Renaissance, exaggerated to that point her ethereal beauty, shakes his right hand with both hands. She smiles at him, and Nikita feels bewildered. She's the most delicate woman he has ever seen, she's beautiful, but what overwhelms him the most is her energy.

He looks at her eyes, as celestial as the sky, and sees how all the lights in the room blink. He leans back when she releases him; she intertwines her hands in front of her body. Doesn't look impressed.

 _Alva_ , Mother said. Kostyantyn has told him that…

"I'm a perceptive too," she says with a lovely smile, soft, sweet. "I’ll teach you how to control all this overdose that overwhelms you so much, Nikita. It's a pleasure to meet you."

Nikita nods; what an intense feeling to have looked at her.

What a beautiful snow-covered mountain he has seen at the end of her eyes.

Finally, Mother takes him to a boy who might be twenty or twenty-one years old, at least in appearance. He looks at him seriously, shakes his hand briefly, almost coldly; Nikita feels something he doesn't understand, that confuses him.

"And this is Artem, as Ukrainian as you," Mother says between laughs. "He has been my right hand for almost a century."

Artem. He had heard that name in the middle of his brain when he drank from Kostyantyn, he had heard his name at a crucial moment.

Artem is someone important to Kostyantyn, as important as Mother and himself. And yes, that reminds of what Kostyantyn said to Kristian: that he wouldn't allow him to hurt any of them.

That's why it seems to be on the defensive?

Artem smiles barely, and he don’t at him; he smiles at Kostyantyn. He moves away, and Nikita, shy, remains in his place just like that.

Mother takes him further; two _shadows_ remain.

"Each Dark Silence headquarters has a maximum authority; most, people who have been in my entourage before. She's our highest authority here in Ukraine, Hanna."

She shakes his hand with a smile on her thin lips. Nikita is surprised that she looks older than the others, that she looks fifty years old; something in her looks very aesthetic, her maturity shines with a special grace.

"A pleasure," Nikita whispers in Ukrainian.

“Me too," she answers in the same language.

It’s she who presents her assistant, a robust man with dark skin; when accepting the greeting, Nikita sees, within himself, a strange image to which he cannot find an explanation.

It seemed sad. But something in the image seemed happy, too. It was a diffuse image, not distinguishable like the mountain of snow in Alva's eyes, but whose central sensation was latent.

"He’s Rob, from United States," Hanna says. "He's partially a perceptive too."

Partially?

Nikita nods and smiles at the kind smile he gives him. Something in the duality of that diffuse image has left him with a tight heart, touched.

After the presentations, Mother takes Nikita by the hand and asks the rest to follow her. They go to another room, the one in the back door, where the walls show abstract paintings and hangers hang an infinity of strange garments; it’s like a collage, one exaggerated, saturated, but also beautiful in some peculiar way.

They sit in a corner, in a rectangle formed by rustic black leather sits that surround a coffee table. Nikita sits in a single chair; Kostyantyn sits next to him, on the right armrest. Mother sits on the other side of the table, in the other single chair, and the rest is divided into two in each big couches, Hanna and Rob on the right, Jandiara and Alva on the left. Finally, Artem remains standing, with his arms crossed to the right of Mother.

"Tell us, sweetie. Please," Mother tells Kostyantyn.

He, without getting up and with his arms crossed too, speaks swiftly in a rather curious but understandable English; certain coldness that he doesn't recognize him dominates. Nikita feels his nervousness despite the thick layer of coldness that covers him; he dies to take his hand, but lets him speak without more, without wishing to interrupt him.

He tells everything what happened in his apartment with Kristian, he does it with an almost disturbing detail.

How does he remember so much, even the smallest data?

Nikita, while Kostyantyn explains everything about that strange dark-eyed woman who recruits perceptives whom she calls _angels_ and who awarded herself a kind of divine mission commanded by the _shadows_ , notes how the faces are mutating. He has some fixation for Alva and Rob, something in them has moved him a lot with very little, but is Mother who captures his complete attention. Her face is prey to the deepest consternation.

"Before leaving," Kostyantyn says at the end, "He told me that she was outside Kiev, where she gathers her angels. If she's able to maintain control over _shadows_ at such a distance, we are talking about an ancient _shadow_ , maybe as old as you, _mama_ , and with an extremely dangerous power of persuasion."

Mother exchanges glances with Artem. Both look worried; a second later, it's as if they share an intimate understanding. Artem smiles at her; she caresses his arm when standing up.

Mother sighs before everyone. Nikita feels, in the air, an anguish that cuts the air in two.

"I know her," she assures, and all the faces, except Artem's, are attacked by the surprise. "I can’t believe she's still alive… And yes, my love: I lied for a reason; I had to protect the _shadows_. Artem is the only person to whom I have confessed this in all these centuries, and I'll not tell you the most crucial reason, to none of you, but I trust you to understand that I did what I had to do, to partially lie about details of our origin to protect what could endanger us all."

Nikita, too concentrated on the reactions, goes back when, from one second to the other, a grey, tabby and adorable cat climbs on his lap. He purrs at him looking like a bun on his legs. Nikita caresses him, but his reaction has been sufficiently striking to catch the attention of everyone present.

The cat's energy is the strongest he has felt until now, it is for a moment; the next one, the energy is completely turned off. He strokes him again, trembling; the cat seems asleep.

"That's Citrus," Mother says." He's the oldest here after me. We both have, in fact, 928 years as _shadows_."

The silence that fills the room is as heavy as disturbing.

Nikita looks at him and doesn't believe it. Is that cat a _shadow_ too?

"Is that your age, Mother? Is that your true age?" Hanna asks, unsettled.

"Yes. It's that woman's age too. She…" Mother walks through the room; there's no elegance in her gestures, but charisma. How charismatic is that woman, and how striking her energy. "She and I were nuns in a monastery southwest of what is Germany now, at that time the Holy Roman Empire; in those years, it was a duplex monastery. It was the 11th century, the time of the crusades; I ended up in that monastery after taking the habits in Florence, where I was born as a human in the year 1060 in a noble family who gave me to the church to consecrate me to God. She, who was my age, came from Styria, now Austria; we get along very well.

"But I fell in love with her. I fell in love with a fierce, dangerous way that took me beyond myself.

"Being nuns consecrated to God, of course I tortured myself for feeling what I felt; I repressed it in the deepest part of me. But I couldn't help it. I couldn't…"

A silence occurs. Nikita feels that she's telling the truth; perceives, in the others, the same conviction.

"At the same time," Mother continues, "Someone, a monk from the monastery attached to the one who was sheltering us, a monk devoted to science and research, became obsessed with us, maybe because we were the youngest, or who knows. The point is that he was a sadist and neither she nor I could do anything about it, just evade him; his inappropriate behaviour brought us together; we discovered that we felt the same for the other, but neither gave way.

"Until one night, she didn't return.

"She disappeared for weeks, the most difficult weeks of my life; she returned one midnight, she appeared to me in my bed and bit me to death. Hours later, I woke up being what I am to this day; neither she nor I understood how it had happened; she drank from me because she was hungry and had no way of controlling herself, by mere instinct, and she gave me her blood imitating the monk, who had given his blood to her."

"Did you never know?" Hanna asks, intrigued.

"Time ago, and that's what you already know, because I didn't lie with that: our blood is that _unusual_ mutation."

Everyone agrees. Nikita notices that they know perfectly well what she’s talking about; he, on the other hand, doesn't understand anything.

Is it so simple to explain, or is there something they are not telling him?

"When we try to go out in the sun and feel the burning on our skins and the weakness in our bodies, we understood that we didn't tolerate it; it was a very hard blow for both of us. Afterwards, we discovered that we needed blood. Understanding all of our new instincts was overwhelming; we thought that we were going to go crazy. But we managed to hide inside the monastery, and we assumed that we were a danger to our sisters and that we should flee,” Mother continues. "Months later, having already saved Citrus from certain death when I found him dying in a nearby town, the monk found us and threw us into an underground cell inside a chapel to kill us with sunlight; he had lost his mind, he was crazy. The three of us escaped not without first killing him and burning everything when we left; we weren't guilty, he was guilty, and he could do nothing before the understanding greater than his that we had developed of our powers, acquired thanks to my talent as a fifth-level learner, the one that I understood as such centuries later.

"With the gift, we believed ourselves blessed by a divine light that would allow us to turn to the world that which God dictated, a place where forgiveness and empathy reign; living in the shadows was the price to pay for being those who had the power to change the order of things, that’s why we proclaim ourselves as such, like the shadows of humanity.

"We live the following centuries in peace at the south of Florence, next to Citrus, studying our gift, making experiments with our own bodies to understand our functioning. When we thought we understood enough, we began to turn other people into _shadows_ , people who had a vocation for service and a deep spirituality. We live one more century like this, being the leaders of a small order of _shadows_ , the first in the world. We were just a handful of members.

"Until the crack occurred in the early fifteenth century, towards the end of the Middle Ages: she had more radical ideas than I, believed that we should exterminate all religious orders and supplant them, that we should replace humans because they are evolved versions and control them as the definitive religion; I believed that we should help humans, that if we had this gift it should serve, from the shadows, to make a difference in the name of God. A group clung to her, the perceptives; another group, of different talents that we had spent time studying, joined me. Unfortunately, there was no way to make her see reason; she fell ill of power. I understood that I had to do something, that too many lives depended on me; I understood that I had to put aside my own feelings in order to save humanity from this danger that kept growing.

"We fought, and we won: we burned her in the little chapel that we had raised, under which we slept in hidden crypts, and the perceptives that followed her came back to themselves. That was because a group of eighth-level learners discovered the tenth talent, that of the persuasive, the _shadows_ that are capable of manipulating other _shadows_ as if they were nothing more than puppets; she, who had kept me by her side for centuries, whom I had loved unconditionally, for whom I had given everything, for nothing."

When finished, Mother cries blood, cries on her black Mötley Crüe shirt.

" _Mama_ …" Kostyantyn whispers. When Nikita looks at him, he finds out that he's crying too. "Then…"

She smiles when she wipes away her bloody tears. Nikita perceives, in them, a feeling as bright as the sun.

"Eventually, because of our irresponsibility in propagating ourselves, the gift spread throughout the world; every _shadow_ of that little order left with their own ideas; we all became disenchanted with her and with the ideas she had made us consider; to separate was the wisest thing, maybe. Just at the end of the 19th century, after going through different orders, groups and organizations, I met you, Hanna, and you helped me to form Dark Silence, this _network_ with which I approached as much as possible to that ideal that I had in my years consecrated to God, although already far from the Church. And I lied about the century to avoid talking about her, because I didn't want to spread ideas like the ones she intended. I didn't want anyone to want to kill humans, not those who don't hurt anyone. Maybe because I accidentally became a _shadow_ , convinced to love her and not become in one, I have an appreciation for humanity, and in my idealism I still believe that I can make a difference in this way.

"I always suspected that she lived, I did it especially since, when I met Artem, I had to expose myself to fire and sun: they did nothing to me despite not having the talent of an indestructible beyond a basic level, which meant that my longevity as a _shadow_ had given me a resistance that young _shadows_ didn't have, and that she should have been as latent as I have been for centuries. But nothing of what I have done behind the back of all Dark Silence with Artem the last ninety years has allowed me to find her; just that image that you claimed to have seen, sweetie; it was the only thing I had, but it wasn't enough. So, thinking that maybe I could find her, before meeting Artem, one night in 1870 when the hunch began to bother me more and more, during my stay in Ireland, I chatted with a writer who was in a tavern reading Polidori's _The vampyre_ and cuts about The Blood Countess. I told him about her and about me, I told him what she made me feel that night, when she bit me, and how that image had been reiterated before my eyes for years, because of the traumatic nature of my transformation; I wanted to try, through him, to get to her, that she knew that I was still somewhere. I think the idea liked the writer, who liked it to the point where I wanted him to like it, because he added elements of which I spoke to his most famous story…"

It's Nikita who says it, stupefied:

" _Carmilla_ …"

Mother raises a hand and, to Nikita's surprise, attracts a book with telekinesis, direct from a huge library on a far wall. She holds it in her hands, and yes, it's _Carmilla_.

"Sheridan Le Fanu was a good man. Somehow, it could be said that Laura is part of what I was, just as Carmilla is part of what she was. He even used her real name to name her, and her origin, Styria, as the setting for the story.“

"Then, that woman that I saw when I woke up with Kristian, the black-eyed woman… " Kostyantyn whispers.

"Is Carmilla, my old companion. Who transformed Kristian, who still dreams with exterminating humans and implanting a new religion at the expense of their lives, a religion centred on her own figure. It's her."

Nikita holds Citrus up in his arms, holds him on his chest and stands up.

He cannot believe it.

"I saw her in a dream…" he says.

Everyone looks at him with surprise. Alva smiles softly.

"Premonitions: it's a quality that is seen a lot among humans with perceptive potential that make contact with _shadows_ ," she says. "That means, Nikita, you are very powerful. Although it’s also possible that it was her herself who implanted that premonition in you: maybe she, when you dreamed that, was before you without you knowing.”

The mere idea gives him chills. But he doesn't slow down; he follows:

"Before meeting Kostyantyn, precisely the night before, I dreamed my human death, I dreamed it metaphorically, but it was more or less what ended up happening a few hours ago…"

More surprise in those present.

"Yes," Alva says. She smiles at him with an overwhelming charm. "Your unconscious built an image in your mind from the energy that you were able to perceive near you: the energy is in constant motion; what you did was to perceive where it was going, that is to say what happened after."

Kostyantyn is in shock, he didn't know what Nikita just revealed; Nikita doesn't need to look at him to know. He thinks about turning to him, holding his hand to calm him, but Mother speaks first:

"What was she doing in your dream?”

Nikita frowns; it will have to be later.

"Well…" he whispers, intimidated by all the looks that point to him, for all the energy he perceives. "I was before a white altar, extremely white, that seemed to be made of glass. Angelic voices, ethereal, sang in unison, and she was on the top of the altar, covered in white, completely white, whiter than the light that illuminated her. She touched me; she was cold, and she told me something I didn't understand. Something like… _sho_ … _scho_ … _shonereiyel_. Something like that, I didn't understand."

" _Schöner engel_ ," Mother says in a painful whisper.

Nikita nods.

"Yes!”

"That's how she named me; _beautiful angel_ in German…" Mother's look fills with melancholy. Artem approaches her and caresses her shoulder; she laughs. "And what else?”

Nikita continues:

"From her eyes, which were white, emanated a kind of strength of black colour, and that colour covered her eyes, and the darkness covered me, and I felt red tears on my face…"

"She was there, without a doubt,” Mother concludes. "And now that I think about it, she always talked about the _shadows_ should be beautiful in an angelic way, that they should be like that, like you, to honour God with a beauty worthy of his paradise; that was the profile of humans that she liked to accept in our order. One of the reasons why she kills young people and discards another may be that, although I couldn't say it for sure: she seems to look for perceptives that look angelic and eliminate the rest, both those who don't have as much potential as those who don't fit the profile. That was another difference between us: I thought that all those who had a good heart deserved it, regardless of their image."

“Glad to hear that," Hanna says, laughing, as if she felt alluded to in some way. "In short, Carmilla is an eighth-level persuasive _shadow_ that has 928 years old and is about to attack us with an army of powerful perceptives. We need to organize as soon as possible."

"Yes. Artem, did you decide where you will go?" Mother asks.

"Belarus. It’s a huge community, we can go unnoticed. Nikita will be able to travel quietly; Minsk headquarters are perfect for a good training."

Will they travel?

Mother smiles.

"We have good friends there. Excellent: Artem, you will take Nikita, Kostyantyn, Jandiara and Alva with you. You are the guide, Jandiara the bodyguard and the rest goes to be safe from these people. If Nikita progresses fast, you may be back in a few days. You'll leave next midnight. Hanna, get a plane with the government, explain to them that we are facing an emergency on which the humanity’s security will depend; they’ll have to cooperate."

She nods, Artem too.

"And what will you do here, _mama_?" Kostyantyn asks. There is some anguish in his voice.

"I called Michal to give me a hand, he'll arrive as soon as it's dark, we'll find the location of Carmilla and her angels and we'll plan how to attack them. I've done it once; I think I can read her movements now that I know she's the one on the other side. Don't worry, sweetie."

Who is Michal?

Why did Nikita feel annoyance in Kostyantyn as soon as Mother mentioned him?

It’s not long before dawn, that indicates the hour that a Roman numeral clock shows on the wall. The majority retires after saying goodbye, and remain, in addition to Nikita, Kostyantyn, Artem and Mother.

"Give me a few seconds to talk to them," Mother asks Artem.

This one, always serious, leaves too. Alone with the two of them, and with Citrus, whom Nikita has left on one of the two couches, Mother urges them to get up. They do it, the three form a triangle in the middle of the room, and Nikita feels that he shouldn’t be there.

" _Mama_ …" Kostyantyn whispers. In him, that kind of coldness that has prevailed during the meeting is no longer palpable; it's the same as always.

Why do he change like this?

"Now you know what I had never been able to tell you," she says; what an intense emotion breaks her beautiful voice in a thousand pieces. "I have always been moved by your story, my love, for being so similar to mine. For that and for everything, for how wonderful you are, you’ll always be my favourite.“ Mother takes his hands, kisses them; Kostyantyn looks like a child before her. "I want you to be well, that you allow yourself to be well, that you leave thinking that soon you’ll return and that you’ll be able to do what you have planned so much, that you can solve your conflict with Kristian and move on. Now you have a beautiful company." Mother, without letting go of Kostyantyn's hands, looks at Nikita; he looks back to her with a gratitude that overflows him. Gratitude for feeling free from that loneliness that had embraced him so much, from that human life that made him unhappy, from the weakness that he couldn't bear to feel, from the prejudices regarding everything that blinded him. "Please, Nikita: take care of my little boy.”

" _Mama_ …" Kostyantyn whispers between laughs, embarrassed.

"Forgive me for loving you too much, darling." Mother kisses Kostyantyn's hands again and dismisses them with a last smile.

How special she is, Nikita thinks as he accepts the hand that Kostyantyn offers to him. It’s still a little hard to walk, but less than when they left the chapel.

At the door, they meet Artem.

"I'll stay with Mother today," he says to Kostyantyn. "Remember to be clear when explaining; you always get tangled in the middle."

He doesn't wait for Kostyantyn to respond; enters the room and closes the immense door. In the middle of the stone corridor, Nikita looks at his hand intertwined with his.

"Do I dislike him?" he asks with more curiosity than sadness.

Kostyantyn laughs.

"No. He's just very strict with me. Now I'll explain you why."

They walk down the hall holding hands; Nikita listens carefully to what Kostyantyn explains:

"When you become a _shadow_ , the custom in Dark Silence is that the _shadow_ that turns the human being educates the new-born. As Kristian and I were separated, the one who educated me was Artem: he taught me everything I’ll teach you, and because of the bond we form… he overprotects me." Kostyantyn makes a silence. Nikita notices how he frowns, how something inside him fills with a very peculiar, illegible, almost childlike tenderness. "He's my best friend since then, sometimes more like a father, sometimes like a brother; most of the time, like a manager who controls everything I do with my career.“

They laugh together.

"So, he still doesn't trust me."

"Let's say he doesn't." Kostyantyn squeezes his hand, caresses it with his thumb. "Artem has never created a _shadow_ ; I’m the closest to that, and that's why he takes great care of me. But calm down, this moment it will get behind as soon as he knows you more.“

“Okay…”

They walk a little more, silent, while their hands speak the language of caresses. Nikita feels Kostyantyn nervous; also, he feels some anguish in him, one that just now notices him. How transparent he seems to him if he thinks in detail about what he perceives; how easy it is to read him if he strives to untangle the threads that make up the complexity of his feelings.

Why, before the others, he only managed to perceive coldness in him? It’s as if he were another kind of person with others, with everyone except with Mother, Artem and him.

Why doesn't he seem to trust anyone?

Nikita understands, by caressing his hand with his thumb as well, which is the first time he sees him in his natural environment, that of the _shadows_. Thinks about what he said in the chapel, in that discomfort that they drink from him and know about him, that unstoppable anxiety.

Does he not trust the others? But if Alva, and Rob, and Jandiara, and Hanna…

If they don't…

They reach a door as imposing as Mother's door. Kostyantyn takes the handle, but doesn't open. While Nikita caressed him, he thought only in one thing.

In the detail that the anguish had generated:

“Then, you dreamed your own death…” he says, and in his voice transpires everything.

Nikita nods; that's what anguish was about. He feels it in the air, feels it pierce his heart.

“I…”

"What exactly did you dream?”

Nikita thinks, remembers and says it looking at the door handle that Kostyantyn hasn't released. There's no point in saving this information.

“I dreamed that I was under the moon, dying. The moon was crying blood on me, and I could smell the books from the bookstore, I was on a kind of bed of books… And a voice that sang, probably yours even if I didn't remember it, asked me to look at it. But I couldn't see the voice; I could see only the moon, and it cried blood, and I drowned with its tears, which fell on my mouth…”

Kostyantyn looks at the door handle when Nikita looks at him.

“I’m so sorry. If I had known that I would put you in danger like this…”

Nikita holds his hand on the door handle.

“Don’t feel sorry: I'm happy, really.”

“But…”

“Kostya, understand.” Nikita hugs him, holds him by the waist, confronts him with his eyes.

How much conviction.

Kostyantyn sighs: it's as if his presence in his life has condemned him, it's as if…

Damn guilt that hugs him so vehemently and still doesn't let go.

It had to be special.

“I’m happy to be a _shadow_ and to be with you…”

“But…”

Nikita pulls him by holding him by the clothes; Kostyantyn collides with him, and looks at him, and doesn't conceive yet how unreal everything feels, to see Nikita in his most majestic state, finally being an accessible _shadow_ , one that he has the ability to touch like this, reflected on the ground under the most powerful sun.

“I know that it will not stop from one day to another, it's not that simple and it relates to things that hurt you for Kristian and what you lived with him, but believe me: I’m happy and I don't feel any regret for having allowed you to transform me. Or maybe…?”

The sadness that fills Nikita isn't only visible in his eyes, suddenly; it floats in the air, it exists.

“What?”

"You didn't want me to become a _shadow_ …?”

Stunned by the question, Kostyantyn picks him up by the waist and kisses him on the lips pressing him against his body. Nikita clings to his neck and kisses him with the same desperation. Then, he leaves him on the ground; he didn't want to confuse him like that.

The problem isn’t that.

"I wanted it…"

What he didn't want was that it was like it was.

What he didn't want was to bring him in the middle of a conflict as big as the one they are facing, expose him to a danger.

Bring him without being able to guarantee the peace that he longs to deposit in his heart. In Nikita's and in his own, at the epicentre of the concept.

What he didn't want, Kostyantyn thinks, is to be so hurt.

The sadness vanishes from him, however, but there remains an uncertainty, something that Nikita doesn't understand. Kostyantyn, soon, looks like a child. He has protected him during all this time, has encouraged him, has helped him to rediscover his dreams, those who now will blossom without guilt of his heart, but there's a tenderness in him, an innocence. It's like a defect, but it's not. It's mere vulnerability.

He’s more fragile than he thought.

Kostyantyn is very fragile; what wild yearnings it unleashes him to notice it now, in his natural environment.

"Don't think about it that much, then…" Nikita asks with a smile. "Relax…"

But Kostyantyn cannot do it: too many things happened, he's still in shock. And he's a child, the child that Nikita feels, the one who has never been able to stop being, stuck in 1986, in that bed, in that scene, in that pain. He's that child, and things had to be different.

"Niki…"

Nikita hugs him. Fills his chest with kisses, squeezes his waist tightly. There is, in him, a freedom that used to belong to Kostyantyn at the time of the demonstrations, that it was only of Kostyantyn when prejudices still blinded Nikita. Kostyantyn understands, by stroking his hair, that Nikita is freer than him, now.

That he should relax, yes.

Kostyantyn opens the door, they enter, he closes it; he takes Nikita by the hand, holds it firmly with his. The room is immersed in absolute darkness. Despite this, Nikita distinguishes forms; above all, he swears to see unequal eyes fixed on him. As if they were illuminated by the sun, as if they were alone in the sun, the two without owner or history, he sees them.

Kostyantyn walks as if he saw perfectly, as if he didn't need lights; his movements are fast, so fast that Nikita feels dizzy when following him. Until Kostyantyn sits on something and urges him to sit on his lap, face to face. Nikita drops the legs on each side of his thighs, and how stuck they are, and how suggestive is the position. As in the chapel, it's as if anything that found them alone had the capacity to be suggestive in an intimate, erotic way.

It’s what they lack. The pending.

What is now possible.

Kostyantyn encircles his waist with one arm, which keeps Nikita firm on him; he holds his face with a cold hand. Nikita, despite the cold, feels warm.

He feels warm within himself, especially.

“I’m too happy, Niki,” Kostyantyn whispers against his half-open mouth. “I’m… Just… Just give me a little more time.”

Curious, Nikita doesn't repress himself; he inquires:

“For what?”

“To believe me enough that I deserve you despite how horrible it was to see you die… To…" He caresses him with his nose, brushes his mouth with his lower lip. How intimate is everything, how dangerous. "To prove everything to you, to show you how much happy it makes me to be on this side with you…”

Nikita realizes, soon, that he has underestimated Kostyantyn's feelings, that he has misinterpreted things: it's true, he saw him die.

He saw him dead. He had him dead in his arms, dead and without certainties, because he didn't know about that decision he had taken to ask him to be a _shadow_ , that he would revive as one.

Which means that…

"Did you think I wouldn't go back?”

"I thought you wouldn't do it, or that you would do it as I came back, full of hatred for what they had done to me.”

“Kostya…”

“Why did you save me?”

When asked, Kostyantyn embraces him with forces that surpass Nikita, not by causing him some pain, but by what he perceives in the grip, a force that expresses all the fear and anguish that the words have described.

He saw him die. He saw him dead. How lucky feels Nikita for didn't have to see him, but how much it hurts to think that Kostyantyn had to…

“Because Kristian pointed that dagger at you as if he were going to stab you in the heart. I remembered _Carmilla_ , I remembered the ending and…”

"Did you think he was going to kill me?”

“I _knew_ he was going to kill you: I felt it. And I didn't think about it, I couldn't; my body moved alone, Kostya… I…” Nikita hugs him; waits, with the same strength with which Kostyantyn is embracing him, be expressing his own fear and anguish. “I didn't want to lose you.”

And he, Kostyantyn, lost him for a few hours.

Nikita, from one second to the other, just needs to put himself in his place to understand the magnitude of the shock.

“We don't die like this,” Kostyantyn says. “The stakes in the heart don't kill us. They can weaken us a lot, but they don't kill us. Only sun does it, sun and fire, or to be decapitated, because we need our heart and our brain to be connected to survive.”

Amazed, Nikita understands even more the guilt that Kostyantyn feels: his death was unnecessary, somehow.

“It doesn't matter: I would have known or not, I wouldn't have allowed you to be hurt.”

“But you sacrificed for me…”

“And I would do it again. Don't feel more guilt, please. And… And just…”

“What?”

Kostyantyn feels how Nikita trembles on him. Something in his energy changes or that he thinks he perceives; Nikita trembles for a reason that it's not related, not at all, to the anguish or shock.

It's something else.

Against his mouth, Nikita tells him in an almost suffocated whisper:

“Just remember that you do deserve me. And it's not because of how wonderful you are; it's because I've decided so.”

They brush their lips in a short, sweet kiss, as emotional as everything seems tonight. As suggestive as the simple fact of being alone, one over the other.

“But…”

“You deserve me,” Nikita reiterates; he feels how his heart falls. “Nobody but you deserve me, I don't care that nobody else deserves me…” Another touch, another kiss; Kostyantyn feels Nikita's agitation, he hears him, but he listens more to himself in his own agitation. “You can show it to me right now, if you want…”

Show him…?

"What…?"

Nikita, trembling, unbuttons his own shirt in slow motion, so slowly that it’s painful, a torture. He takes Kostyantyn's hands, puts them on his chest and sighs for the contact; they are frozen, both, but the simple touch of their skins feels like fire.

"I'm…" Nikita whispers. He still holds his hands against his chest, until he slides them to his stomach, and then to his ribs, and then to his waist, where he presses them with some urgency. "If you want me, I'm your…"

"Niki, no…"

The hands tremble more against the waist. Kostyantyn slides his fingers down Nikita's back. Listens, in the dark, an irregular sigh, as trembling as their bodies in full contact.

"Don't you…?"

Kostyantyn notices the break in Nikita's voice; fearing that he would take his attitude as a rejection, he hurries:

"More than anything else, Niki: I want nothing more than to say yes, to take off your clothes, to show you everything I feel for you." Passing all prudent limits but with no way to resist, Kostyantyn kisses Nikita's naked chest, where his hands have been mere moments ago. Nikita shivers at the touch, and sighs, and nothing transmits but heat. "But I can’t; if I want to take care of you, if I want it to be as special as you deserve, I can’t…"

Nikita gets up; the movement is not abrupt, but it’s prudent. Kostyantyn listens to how the buttons are fastened when he turns his back on him, how he advances three steps away from him.

With his powers, Kostyantyn lights a lamp: under a dim golden light, Nikita's dressed back hypnotizes him.

If this is how it looks dressed, so majestic, how perfect it would look without anything.

"It's because I'm still mutating, right?"

Kostyantyn laughs, which, in turn, allows him to relax a little despite the subjugating desire that imprisons him. He responds calmly, with all the calm that he can tame in such a situation, one where so much desire reigns between them:

"Yes. In fact, there are things you can't do, Niki: when one _shadow_ has sex with another, all kinds of instincts are aroused. Maybe you'll throw me to the ceiling, maybe you'll break my neck, maybe you'll go so fast that…"

"Will I have the capacity to do all that when I learn?”

Kostyantyn advances three steps towards him. He reaches him up, hugs him from behind, kisses him on the neck and feels him tremble under his lips.

"Yes: speed, strength, telekinesis, telepathy, these are some of the skills you’ll have when I teach you. Especially for physical abilities, it's wise to first learn you to master them."

Kostyantyn kisses him more, and more, and tries to hold back from advancing, from stripping, from possessing. “It's not that complicated; it's about understanding your _shadow_ instincts and all your abilities; it's about learning to use them to enjoy intimacy together with whoever you choose to share it.”

"Love as a _shadow_ …"

"That's it. It's different." Kostyantyn realizes that Mélovin is present; he looks at the neck, dies for biting it, dies for sending to the devil all Kostya's beliefs, all the yearning that fills him, that need for everything to be special, ideal, perfect, beautiful, sweet more than erotic. "We don't lose the ability to feel pleasure even though we do lose the ability to procreate; sex is, for us, a kind of ritual. It's the same, but it has differences, some very noticeable, others barely noticeable."

"As which?”

Kostyantyn narrows his shoulders; Mélovin opens his mouth, but stops. He mustn't bite him; Nikita is weak.

"Like…"

He explains explicit details with some shyness, but also seriously. It's weird, for him, to talk about these things to Nikita. It feels mundane, details that such a high existence wouldn't never deserve to hear, things about the differences that cause…

"I get it." Nikita holds his hands, caresses them. He burns. "It's different…"

"It disappoints you?”

Nikita laughs. How shy sounds his laugh for a moment.

"No. They are details. And they don't have to be negative…"

Although Nikita cannot see him, Kostyantyn nods.

"That's the important. Plus…" he adds, "well, there are many things to say, but we can leave them for later, if you want. I think I told you too much for today. “

"One night it felt like a whole month…"

"And more, Niki."

They get closer, Nikita always with Kostyantyn's chest behind him. Soon, a tiredness between them reigns, never of the other, but mentally and emotionally in essence.

Too many things happened. They will need days to assimilate everything.

"I still want to know so many things about so many topics…"

Kostyantyn smiles: he loves the curiosity that Nikita shows for his new way of life and everything that implies.

"We have so much time that it would be a calamity to speak it… and do it all today."

"It’s true…"

 _Forever_ , they think at once; they have a _forever_ ahead, a promise made. What they need, they understand with astonishing synchronization, is to relax and nothing else.

Nikita turns to the left with clear intentions of hugging Kostyantyn, but brakes sideways against him. Kostyantyn feels the tension in his body. He looks at him, investigates when doing it, and a detail shocks him.

To the left of both, on the wall, lies a mirror.

He releases Nikita, who slowly approaches the image that the mirror returns to him.

"That myth about we can't see ourselves in the reflection was a lie?”

"An exaggeration to which I don't find any foundation," Kostyantyn says. "I guess it has to do with the diabolical origin that a lot of literature uses for us, when our origin is of a more scientific nature, you could say.”

Nikita advances more towards his image; Kostyantyn notices how he touches the mirror, how the fingers of the reflection join with the fingers he rests on the surface. With eyes wide open, Nikita looks at himself in detail.

He doesn't recognize himself.

His hair is darker, curlier; his eyelashes look longer. His skin, pale, isn't at the level of Kostyantyn, but it's pale, enough to amaze him; there are no longer traces of his golden skin, the skin that he has been known throughout his life. Now, his tone is different, as if he had put a lot of white makeup on him. The eyes shine in another way, meanwhile; he looks younger than he remembers, and his teeth…

He opens his mouth, looks at them: his fangs are huge and very pointy, even more than those of Kostyantyn.

He looks at the nails: they are pointy too. They look aesthetic, they match with everything else. He likes what he sees, he understands.

He smiles, and only when he does Kostyantyn approaches. He hugs him from behind and looks into his eyes thanks to the reflection.

"You're beautiful," he whispers in his ear.

Nikita looks at the image: it’s the first time he sees himself with Kostyantyn, that he can abstract himself from what they are to glimpse from the outside, not from look to look but from look to a full image. He throws back his arms and hugs his waist while still looking at the mirror.

"We are…" he whispers.

Kostyantyn also notices it: they are. He didn't need to look in the mirror with him to know, but how beautiful they are. How good they look; how good they feel to be able to see each other.

"Yes, we are," he replies.

The reflection allows Kostyantyn to see the clock in the mirror that is on the opposite wall: he must hurry.

"It's about dawn, Niki…" he says. He takes his hand after kissing his cheek before the mirror, a gesture that moves them more than the reflection expresses. Taking him by the hand, he guides him to the end of the luxurious room.

Two towering coffins rest before their eyes.

Kostyantyn notices Nikita's impression when he sees the coffins. Laughing, he touches his shoulder.

"Yes: we sleep in coffins," he says, "like in the books.”

Nikita agrees without hiding the impression. He doesn't know what he thinks about this, maybe it gives him a bit of claustrophobia, rejection, but, in himself, he feels somehow that he’s taking everything very well, even what he doesn't fully understand yet.

Maybe it's not that he's taking it well, but that shock is what helps him not to think too much.

"Which one is it for me?" he asks with shyness.

"The one on the left is Artem's. You will sleep in the one on the right,” Kostyantyn announces. When Nikita looks at him, he notices that he expected that, his gaze. When the eyes lie on the eyes, Kostyantyn continues. “With me.”

Nikita smiles almost without realizing it. He presses his fists, holding back how seduced he still feels. A thought fills him with shame, however, and plunges him into a state of sudden panic.

"I-I don't have sleepwear…" he says. Everything is in his apartment.

As far as his human life.

Kostyantyn laughs. He doesn't hide the mischief that the moment confers to him, nor a certain nervousness that only reflects, in another way, the same vulnerability as before.

It’s curious for Nikita to notice, soon, Kostyantyn’s ambiguity regarding everything that is related with sex. On one hand, he provokes, he seduces, he jokes; on the other, carrying certain ideas somewhat adolescent, he idealizes. He does it when he talks about being special, when he demands too much of himself.

Why?

"You can leave what you have put on now, it's your choice. In my case, I keep the clothes I have and I change at sunset, when I wake up, after a shower. The _shadows_ were very cold, so we slept as dressed as possible."

"Ah…"

"What happens is that it's not _sleeping_ the right word," Kostyantyn adds, scratching his forehead, "but _turning off_. I have to teach you to turn off."

Nikita goes back.

"What?" he just says.

"Come."

Kostyantyn opens the coffin with a movement of his hand in the air. Nikita looks inside: it looks very comfortable, it's covered with velvet. He punishes for thinking comfortable a coffin, but then it's said what has already been said, that everything is a matter of seeing things with eyes of a _shadow_ , not of a human. If for the _shadows_ it's common to sleep in coffins, then he shouldn't see it with his human prejudices.

Kostyantyn stands inside the coffin and extends a hand to him.

"Come on, we don't have much time."

Nervous though moved, Nikita nods. When he accepts the hand and enters the coffin, Kostyantyn surrounds him with his arms and knocks him down beside him on the velvet. They look at each other, squeezing each other.

"It's customary for new-born _shadows_ to sleep with their progenitor _shadows_ the first few days. Resting in a coffin is a bit… peculiar at the beginning."

"Don't tell me…" Nikita whispers, sure that his face is expressing all the panic that fills him to be inside one.

Kostyantyn urges him to hug him too; Nikita follows him, laying his face on Kostyantyn's chest, and only by feeling stuck to him he can relax. Just a little, but he succeeds.

"I'll close the coffin."

"Okay…"

A noise, and all light disappears.

Nikita breathes with difficulty: there's no air, not enough. He panics for no reason; he doesn't like places like this, so closed. He doesn't like to see so much darkness.

But he loves to lie next to Kostyantyn and feel his hands caressing his arm and back.

"Easy, Niki…" he whispers tenderly.

"I don't know why I get so nervous, I'm sorry…"

"It's normal, it's hard at first. Seriously: easy. It's for protection that we do it: the sun kills us, and an unexpected accident could annihilate us in a second."

Nikita nods against the chest. He trembles, and the caresses on the back become slower, but more intense. And he trembles more, but Kostyantyn's voice begins to hum a song he doesn't know, slow, sweet.

" _Nana narana, naranara na_ …"

Nikita laughs. He feels like a child.

Then, it's as if the weight of everything that has happened fell on him with the violence that only the most indisputable truth could have.

He’s a _shadow_ , he will never see the sun again, he will never do human things again, he will never see the few people that existed in his life. He will not go back to the bookstore, he will not see those clients or Mr. Oleg again. He will not return to that life.

Never.

"Niki…"

This one trembles more than ever. Awkwardly, with no other intention than to endure the intensity of emotions that fill him, he climbs Kostyantyn's body until he lies on top of him. He wraps his legs around his, and trembles, and trembles, and sobs.

"Are you realizing everything?”

"Yes…"

"Are you… regretful?"

"Never… But it's difficult. I suppose that… everything went so fast…"

"It was."

Nikita squeezes himself into Kostyantyn's body, he does so with forces he doesn't master. Nothing craves more than to stop shaking, to learn, to…

"We overwhelm you today. I shouldn't have taken you to the meeting with _mama_ or told you everything else…"

"It's okay…"

"No, it's not. Forgive me."

"Kostya…"

He starts humming again. _Nana narana, naranara na_ , and Nikita breathes with an overexertion.

"Kiss me, please…" he asks, nervous.

Kostyantyn does it immediately, holds him to each side of the face and kisses him tenderly, slowly, without hurrying, demonstrating every nuance of the complex web of emotions that Nikita provokes, needing that he feels it, to know how much he needs him and with what conviction he yearns his happiness in this new point of his existence.

But Nikita still wants more than that.

When the kiss accelerates naturally, when it evolves from love to passion, it becomes clear that the intimacy of that dark enclosed space means intimacy itself, and darkness invites a lot, and loneliness too, and feelings too.

Being the same, above all, invites too much.

"When it happens, it will be beautiful and you will love it: I swear it," Kostyantyn whispers between kisses, hating to stop what happens, but aware that it’s the best. For Nikita and everything he doesn't know.

For himself and the sensitivity that the subject gives him. Because he's ready, he knows he is, but he needs a little more time.

He needs to leave behind the bad memories of his traumatic transformation. Because Nikita's has been traumatic, but it's not the one that generates the problem.

It's his own, that night with Kristian, something he hasn't confessed in detail to Nikita, not yet.

Meanwhile, Nikita breathes the little air that surrounds them against his half-open mouth. Kostyantyn has respected him too much, all the time, even when only prejudices filled him. Is he behaving like an idiot?

"I'm sorry, Kostya. Sorry if I look like one, I don't know…"

How much moves him those apologies. Kostyantyn doesn't forbid laughing.

"How perverse it turned out to be my boyfriend…" he says, having fun.

"I'm your boyfriend?” Nikita asks, his face buried in his chest, stroking against his shirt.

"You are, do you need me to ask you formally?”

“You could…"

"Okay: do you want to be my evil boyfriend, little sir?“

"Okay."

They remain embraced, still over the other, happy. There’s tension between both, there's heat and desire, but it's better to wait. There's too much involved, not just security.

It would be Nikita's first time with a man; it would be Kostyantyn's first time with the special person he has waited so long for.

Because Nikita is right without even suspecting it: the problem is that, the idealization.

" _Shadows_ have sex in coffins?”

"No, it's not common.”

"I’m glad to hear that…"

They laugh again. Kostyantyn squeezes him by the waist.

"Are you calmer?"

"Yes.”

From desire, they return to love. Reluctantly, in part, but not really: among them, because of the chemistry they have, everything feels natural. It's fantastic.

If everything goes well, it will be more and more.

Nikita is still nervous; the kiss and the game have relaxed him, but not a lot. It's better to move forward with learning:

"So… What is to turn off?“

Hating for a moment having to change the subject, Kostyantyn clears his throat. He thinks, moved, that Nikita is changing the subject to respect him. It’s difficult to him, to both, because love is so much that it needs to be expressed; the gesture expresses more than it seems.

It’s beautiful.

"We are dead; our bodies are," Kostyantyn explains. "But when the sun rises, although it doesn't shine on us, it weakens us, because what we as humans have benefited from the sun, especially the production of vitamin D through UV, as _shadows_ can kill us. It's as if the opposite effect were produced."

"That's why the sun kills us…"

"Yes. Anne Rice described it beautifully: her vampires die when they are transformed into ashes, although they become more resistant over the years. The same thing happens to us: it turns us into ashes because our blood, as we have studied, receives the opposite effect of UV. What once benefited us in terms of vitamin D that UV can produce, now harms us. Dries our skin, pulverizes it. Our dead bodies are weak to what UV provoke us. We are vulnerable to it, so much so that, at dawn, we naturally become weak, although the sun doesn't reach us. Over the years, however, our dead bodies are tanned, so to speak; they harden, they become more _shadows_ and less human, as well you could notice in _mama_. We never stop evolving."

"We never stop losing humanity…"

"Exactly."

"And then…?"

Kostyantyn kisses Nikita's forehead.

"We can't sleep, we have no reason to sleep; being _shadows_ takes away that need as well as so many other. But the sun weakens us enough to take us to a kind of self-induced unconsciousness. We turn off; we close our eyes, we sink in the weakness that paralyzes us and we lose consciousness."

Surprised, Nikita feels he wants to know everything now, right now. He cannot stop feeling surprised, hallucinating at what Kostyantyn tells him.

He’s filled with a really fierce enthusiasm.

"We became corpses for a few hours…"

"Yes." Kostyantyn kisses his forehead again. "At nightfall, when the sun goes down, all that energy that annuls us returns, triumphant. The return is so abrupt that it leads us to _turn on_ , or wake up."

Nikita nods. He has so many questions that he barely supports himself. Sleeping, or turning off, will be difficult to him.

Or not.

He feels how his energy, every drop of it, leaves him. It's like when the dream comes and the eyelids weigh. It's similar, but it's not the same. It’s more abrupt, more violent.

"It was dawn, Niki. You feel it?"

"I feel it…"

"Close your eyes and relax: it's common for you to don’t bear this weakness; you are a very young _shadow_. I’ll be here with you, taking care of you…"

Sweet hands glide down his back, down his arm, down his face, while a voice hum once more, _nana narana, naranara na_ …

It’s like sinking into a dark tunnel, a feeling that gives him a vertigo like the one that Kostyantyn provoked in his first encounters. It's like dying the way he did a few hours ago.

It's like sinking into the fog once more. He’s dead, he understands before everything disappears. He's dead, but his life is conserved conceptually.

He doesn't know how, he still doesn't understand it, nor does he understand why some functions of his ancient humanity are still enabled and others don't, but he cannot think.

He cannot do anything.

He dies again, as conceptually as he lives.

Meanwhile, Kostyantyn narrows him. He still doesn't come out of the shock. Feeling his dead weight in his arms unleashes all kinds of traumatic images in him.

He will need to work hard to stop blaming himself for Nikita's human death.

This night ends wonderfully, because both are the same and they are together. But it didn't have to be that way.

Like that night, Kristian on him, his eyes filled with a love that was seen, in his pupils, like a flame of fire, fire despite how cold his body was, so different than how Kostyantyn knew him from previous encounters. So devoted to him, so vehement his movements, so full of a passion that it didn't seem enough, because the feeling was more real than reality.

"I love you, Kostya…" Kristian repeated without air, hugging his waist, with his hips restless against him, feeling him with a smile of perpetual emotion.

"Me too…"

"Die with me then…"

"Die…?"

"Die, Kostya… Die to be free…"

Lack of control in the heart, lack of control measured to the unhealthy with his inexperienced hip. Cold hands paralyzing him on the bed.

"What are you talking about, Kris…?"

"I’m talking about to be together forever…"

Kostyantyn cries blood at the thought, cries the blood that’s strong for drink from the one who is lifeless over his body.

Nikita deserved better.

… But he's not going to give up.

Furious with himself, he swears it when he wipes away his tears: he will not give up.

He will not allow the darkness of guilt to blind him.

He will not rest until he believes what he doesn't believe, what he doesn't conceive.

That he deserves him.

That this feeling, that subjugates him with joy despite how many sorrows have marked him in his past, deserves Nikita, his light, his conceptual warmth.

That he deserves him, that one deserves the other.

That this, perhaps, was exactly what should happen.

That this element was necessary to succeed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! If you get to this point, thank you so much... :')
> 
> I will say some things the next time; now, I feel quite emotional and I can't, words don't come to me. 
> 
> Thank you Raddie, Blake, Di, Memi and Kostya Anon for being so nice with me all this time, all this year. It means the universe. It's everything, because it's about this story that has helped me so much all this time...
> 
> And as usual: forgive my English, please. I'm trying to improve and I'm giving my best. 
> 
> Just thank you with my heart and soul. ♥
> 
> Seeya next year. :')
> 
> I hope you have a beautiful 2019. ♥


	17. XVI

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Finally on Belarus, Nikita is determined to learn as quick as possible how to be a shadow. 
> 
> But first, he needs to confirm some things.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Forgive my English, please. ♥
> 
> I hope you like it.

**XVI**

The National Library, one of the landmarks of Minsk, capital of Belarus. Nikita has never seen a more imposing architecture. Soft rain falls on him and it sneaks the recent winter to his bowels; blue LED lights illuminate the building that has the shape of a diamond and embellish it to an inconceivable point.

It's his first time here, and he already feels in love for life.

"I came here in the 90s, they hadn't made the new part yet," Kostyantyn tells him. "It looks beautiful."

"Like an ocean taking the shape of a diamond and floating before our eyes…" Nikita whispers.

Kostyantyn is curious about the metaphor; to his right, he notices Alva's tender smile and Jandiara's smug giggle. Artem, meanwhile, nothing, until he finally speaks:

"Come on, the secret entrance is a hundred meters from here, outside the building."

Everyone follows him, or so Kostyantyn believes: Nikita, with his eyes fixed on the National Library, doesn't move.

"Niki, we must…"

"It reminds me your eyes."

Kostyantyn frowns.

"What?"

"The blue light on the glasses… It’s as beautiful as your eyes."

He turns his face to him and smiles at him with notorious emotion. Kostyantyn, touched to notice how seriously Nikita speaks, holds him by the hand and pulls him towards him.

“You’re so silly…" Kostyantyn whispers when he hears how Nikita laughs softly.

Nikita has been in a state of very noticeable sensitivity since they woke up together for the first time being both _shadows_ , something that has happened exactly seven hours ago, frantic hours for both.

Beautiful, they think at the same time as they walk behind Artem and the others, was to wake up, or to turn on, next to the other that first sunset. Nikita still hadn't reacted, which gave Kostyantyn enough time to open the coffin and sit on it with Nikita in his arms, unconscious on him like a sweet sleeping beauty.

When he woke up, he wasn't so sweet.

"I'm very thirsty, I-I can't stand it…" he said in a painful whisper. It was as if a longing he didn't understand was devouring him from the inside.

Kostyantyn hurried to offer his neck; what an intense way to start the night. Nikita didn't want to let go from his neck, but he released him, and leaned back against his chest as he hugged him tightly, trembling.

“It would be this hard?"

"Just the first days," he promised in a firm voice.

Mother recommended them look for Nikita's belongings in his apartment, which had been cleansed of all traces of blood by Artem and Jandiara the night before, in case something could put at risk their secret existence; in cases like that, it was the mandatory procedure.

When they arrived, in company of Jandiara, whose eighth level strength made her the best bodyguard on planet Earth, she waited on the balcony for Kostyantyn to help Nikita to save the essentials in a couple of bags.

While Nikita took a quick shower and changed, Kostyantyn checked his library with distracted eyes, trying to do anything, whatever it was, least remember the traumatic events of the previous night, those that occurred in that same scenario.

When Nikita reappeared before him, he was wearing sober and black clothes, which he always wore, although the colour made his notorious pallor of _shadow_ stand out in a more intense way.

Beautiful.

"You can leave your apartment closed in the meantime. Then, when your training is over, you can decide what to do with it, if you continue living here or…" Kostyantyn explained.

"First, we have to beat Carmilla," Nikita answered; he could notice the seriousness with which he had taken the conflict. "After, well, we'll see. What matters the most to me right now is being with you and learning."

Kostyantyn held back the tears, those that Nikita could tear him off so easily, by nodding.

Before closing the apartment, Kostyantyn saw how Nikita wrote a quick letter on a sheet taken from a notebook.

"What do you do?” he asked him.

"I write my resignation."

Once they left, Jandiara carrying the bags as she ran next to Kostyantyn through the dark walls of Kiev's buildings, the latter thought of the attitude that Nikita was demonstrating: he was so convinced of everything that it seemed unreal. He envied him in the healthiest way.

Noticing his conviction relaxed his anguish at the epicentre of his conceptual heart.

He carried Nikita in his arms, because he still didn't know how to move like a _shadow_ ; Nikita was hugging his back while Kostyantyn held him by the thighs.

"This is so…" Nikita whispered holding a peculiar laugh.

"What?”

"So… _Twilight_ …"

Jandiara erupted in laughter. Kostyantyn and Nikita themselves did it.

"Tell me you didn't see that shit!" Jandiara yelled. "Vampires that shine in the sun, what a horrible thing."

"It didn't seem as bad as all say, I think people exaggerate," Nikita commented; he didn't stop laughing. "But, well, anything is good a boring and lonely night with Netflix…"

"Not even like that! I'll call you _Bella_ from today, pretty boy."

Nikita stifled a laugh against Kostyantyn's back. He felt tickled when he perceived it.

"No, please…" he begged between laughs.

They stopped before a house in the outskirts, a simple but immense two-floors house with red walls and a black door. Nikita walked slowly towards the door and passed the letter underneath it. Then, he ran and climbed Kostyantyn's back, but not before ringing the bell. Mr. Oleg came out a few seconds later; he lifted the paper looking in all directions. He read it right there, surprised; although his face showed a deep sadness, a smile of pride shone in his mouth.

"He's proud of you," Kostyantyn told Nikita.

He nodded, happy.

"I'll miss him so much…"

Mr. Oleg clung to the letter, looked at the sky for a moment and closed the door; the smile had covered everything on his face.

"What did you say to him?”

"That I love you, that I decided to go away with you and that I’ll be grateful to him forever for advising me to stay with you that night, in the bookstore…"

Kostyantyn didn't know that. Touched, he thanked Mr. Oleg too without taking his eyes off the door.

Once they returned to Dark Silence, Kostyantyn couldn't refuse: he drank blood from Mother, Artem and Hanna.

"You have to be very strong for Nikita," Mother explained as he drank, not without the usual embarrassment. "Artem will feed for you in Belarus; when Nikita finishes understanding his abilities, you will take him to feed with you. Only then you can return, when he knows everything."

When he returned to the room he occupied in the headquarters, he found Nikita talking to Alva; they were holding hands to each other.

"Things about perceptives, Mélovin: I was explaining the basics to him, that he can refuse to perceive so many things as soon as he understands how to master his talent,” she told him when she received him and left them alone.

Nikita, sitting on the coffin where they had turned off together, looked at him seriously.

"Why do almost everyone call you _Mélovin_ here?”

Kostyantyn wasn’t ready for that question, not yet. Trying to block his emotions so that Nikita wouldn't perceive the lie, he told him that it was mere coquetry.

"I like to use my stage name for everything. Although, of course, I couldn't use it even with you, with _mama_ or with Artem…"

"Ah…"

Kostyantyn realized instantly that Nikita didn't believe him. He knew, when Nikita looked into his eyes, that he knew he knew. They smiled, and the gesture seemed to seal the matter.

They would speak about that in the right moment.

Rob interrupted at the best time:

"You already have a flight, in two hours."

They prepared for that. Nikita gathered the most indispensable in one of the two full bags that he had brought from his apartment; Kostyantyn put together the usual bag, with which he travelled around the world for so long.

He was going to miss Ukraine too much.

Before traveling, they both walked through the halls of the headquarters to say goodbye to Mother, when someone intercepted them.

"Mélovin! I haven't seen you in a while, how are you?!” it said a masculine voice with a very peculiar English, even more peculiar than Kostyantyn’s itself.

Nikita looked at him: Kostyantyn was annoyed. They turned towards the voice at the same time.

Tall, thin, beautiful; a man so beautiful that looking at him meant being blinded, with hair so curly, so long; with so elegant clothes, so refined; looking so wild and fearless. His eyes, celestial, it radiated joy, hope, charisma, life.

Colour.

He was incredible.

"Hi, Michal," Kostyantyn said with demarcated antipathy.

Michal? Nikita saw how he was hugging Kostyantyn and how Kostyantyn didn't respond to his gesture. He remembered that name: Mother said that Michal would help find Carmilla.

How?

"Your boyfriend?”

"Yes. Nikita, he's Michal, from Poland, a former member of Mother's entourage and the most powerful perceptive that Dark Silence knows."

"And I'm singer, my dear. Don’t forget that part!”

The most powerful perceptive? Nikita waved at him, feeling intimidated; Michal hugged him, grabbed his face with his cold, delicate hands of black-painted nails and smiled at him with huge charisma.

"Hi, Nikita. You are as lovely as mom said,” he assured stroking his cheeks with circular movements of his thumbs on the skin, which he pressed with a delicacy that was seductive.

Nikita frowned, still intimidated, shy, uncomfortable: he had felt Rob and Alva intensely, especially Alva, and they had talent as a perceptive like him. Why he felt anything about Michal?

"You feel anything because I'm blocking your ability to do it."

Nikita took three steps back. Michal, smiling, took a step forward.

"But calm down: I'll let you know me a little,” he added.

Always charming, Michal took Nikita's hand, all under Kostyantyn's annoyed gaze. He pulled him against his chest and looked at him with a fixity impossible to avoid.

There was no escape.

Why…?

_»Mom loves us both, she has a natural weakness for both, because we are her children-singers. Mélovin has never loved me very much; he's jealous. Above all, and he’ll never admit it, he's jealous because mom is very enthusiastic about my music and I've always been very critical of him, because I feel he lacks ambition as a composer; she's my number one fan, and that, although he himself knows that he's his favourite and he’ll always be, it annoys him in that sensitive and insecure corner that, I'm sure, you already know him. Let's say that, in short, he's jealous like a younger brother. On the other hand, I’m that older brother who enjoys making fun of the situation._

Nikita looked at Michal: he had heard his voice in the middle of his brain, as if it was part of his own thoughts.

_»Think and you can answer me without speaking. If it helps, look at me._

Nikita did it without knowing if he would make it.

_»Like this…?_

_»Yes._

_»Oh…_

_»You’re very strong, Nikita… You’re stronger than you think._

_»Do you think so?_

_»I know it! But I'll let Alva confirm it with her method, which is very interesting and will help you to understand your abilities quickly._

_»Okay…_

_»And one more thing. I shouldn't tell you, but I can't help it!_

_»What?_

_»Look at him when it happens. Mélovin is like a child even though he isn't anymore; he needs to be convinced._

Convinced? Nikita couldn't continue the conversation: Michal winked at him, released him and walked down the corridor singing Aerosmith's 'Dream on' with a voice that was just perfect, so perfect that only minutes later he was able to react to it.

"How well he sings…" he said as he could.

"Bah…" Kostyantyn put his hands inside his pockets. "What did he tell you?”

Nikita decided not to tell him everything; Kostyantyn didn't discover it.

"He told me that I'm very strong, but that Alva will confirm it."

"He felt that you are an eighth level surely, which is very possible."

"And how is he the strongest?”

"He's the only perceptive we know whose level borders the ninth. It's an anomaly that occurs very rarely, a very rare case. Jandiara is the same in her class, the only warrior, as we call them, which borders the ninth level."

Is Jandiara so strong? Strong enough to be the strongest?

Afterwards, the farewells interrupted the questions.

The five of them climbed into a black van that was waiting for them at the door of the National Art Museum of Ukraine, one of polarized windows led by a policeman. Behind the van, two patrol cars awaited.

The government was protecting them, it wasn't a lie.

Before that, next to the piano in her rehearsal room, Mother filled Kostyantyn with kisses and kisses and kisses. Meanwhile, he embraced her in silence until the schedule forced him to release her. After that, Nikita noticed that Mother kissed Artem in the mouth, and Alva, and Jandiara too. He also noticed the last two taken by the hand, very affectionate with each other, especially Jandiara with Alva, who seemed delighted with the caresses. Were they a couple, maybe? Asking himself that made him smile.

Mother kissed him in the mouth too; Nikita didn't have the courage to refuse. Behind her, Hanna, Rob and Michal laughed.

"Take care of each other, precious. When you come back, I'll play the piano for you and you'll sing a thousand songs to me. Can you promise me that?“

He felt emotion stir Mother: she was on the verge of tears.

Nikita nodded.

"It will be an honour."

A caress on the cheek, and Mother gave him a cold blood syringe.

"It's the same blood of the other time, it will help you travel calm and it will be a good break for Kostyantyn."

Out of curiosity, Nikita, after accepting the syringe and feeling how to drink that cold blood filled him in a different way, asked who it came from.

Mother crossed her arms. She turned to the piano.

"The strongest of us."

Citrus watched him from the top of the piano, silent and elegant as he licked one of his front paws. Nikita tried to say something, although he didn't know what exactly, for which reason he stayed quiet.

Once on the way to the airport, Kostyantyn explained something to him in whispers:

"Drinking from Citrus is like drinking twice from _mama_ ; feeds more than any other _shadow_ we know. We believe that it's for two reasons: first, because Mother is the only one who feeds him since the first day, which already gives him enormous power; second, because he's a cat, and they are better at everything. But of course: this theory is mine, and I'm a blinded cat lover."

Nikita laughed with Kostyantyn, but curiosity didn't leave him.

Why Citrus's blood was notoriously superior to the rest?

"We also believe that it's because he rarely gives blood to anyone," Kostyantyn added. " _Mama_ gave you his blood because you were born as a very weak _shadow_ for the wound in your chest. That makes you even a bit thirstier than you should be if the procedure had been more appropriate."

"I see…"

But he didn't. And it intrigued him.

Finally, a short flight and they were in Minsk in almost a blink. Now, after entering through a secret door hidden inside a small military base located one hundred meters from the Library, they advance through a dark corridor without emitting more sound than their footsteps when advancing. Nikita and Kostyantyn don't let go of their hands; they are equally nervous about what is coming.

The corridor ends; a steel door, heavy and thick, is right before them. Jandiara releases Alva and pushes the door with a finger while looking at Nikita, tempted to laugh.

Nikita's impression is absolute.

They enter, and what they find is a wide, modern, dark and empty space. In the middle, there's a kind of figure similar to one of the National Library, but it's only a little higher than an average man and it shines in different colours thanks to the LED lights that it receives from reflectors located on each corner of the ceiling. At the top, A woman is sitting. She turns her back on them.

She has a violin in her hands; the white dress she is wearing, in contrast to her olive skin, makes her look dreamy, like the most beautiful ghost.

"Long time no see," Artem says.

Nikita is surprised when he notices that Artem smiles; since he met him, he has never seen him do it, not to someone who wasn't Kostyantyn.

The woman begins to play a melody with her violin, short, but intense. Then, she jumps from the figure towards them. Harmonious features paint her face.

"Welcome to Dark Silence, Minsk headquarters," she says in English with an exotic, hypnotic charm. "I'm Maimuna. Artem and I were companions in Mother's entourage many years ago, when Mother spent a long time in the Soviet Union."

Artem approaches her and hugs her briefly. Then, the rest greets her with a kiss and a handshake.

"Mother already told me everything," Maimuna explains. "The Minsk headquarters are small, but the _shadow_ community of Belarus is the third largest of Europe, after Germany and Bulgaria; as the Russian government doesn't look kindly on the _shadows_ , most come to live here. It will be very easy for you to go unnoticed.”

Slowly, behind the glass figure, another _shadow_ emerges. He's a confident man, dressed in black and white, almost as pale as Kostyantyn. As Nikita has noted, pallor has to do with longevity. He doesn't know if he's right, but that man looks young, a young _shadow_.

“He's Uzari, my assistant and companion," Maimuna presents him. Uzari nods to everyone with his arms crossed and a smile on his lips. "We are both eighth level shields; Minsk headquarters are protected like no other.”

Uzari surrounds Maimuna's shoulder with one of his arms. He's strong, hardened.

“We’ll do everything possible to keep things under control. We hope you can know a little our country!" he says in an almost raspy voice.

Shields? Is that another talent? Nikita realizes that Kostyantyn hasn't told him enough about it yet. Maybe, they can start as soon as possible. Nothing he wants more; he's somewhat annoyed by not understanding enough.

However, Kostyantyn, who perceives in Nikita the annoyance of ignorance clutched at his hand, knows that Nikita understands more than he believes. It's the manifestation of his basic talent as a learner; he doesn't stop accumulating information, deducting it properly.

Little remains after, more than retiring to the rooms that they designated to them within the headquarters, that of Artem at the beginning of a corridor that’s separated by five doors from Kostyantyn and Nikita’s. Alva and Jandiara are halfway between them, in a room located on the other side of the corridor.

All take half an hour to settle. Inside their room, which keeps LED lights on a ceiling similar to the top of the diamond, that has mirrors on the upper edges of the walls that give a kind of kaleidoscope effect to the space, Nikita feels immersed in a dream.

"I-Is beautiful…"

"Yes, and very… exaggerated? But exaggerated in a good way."

"It's melodramatic.”

"So Eastern Europe…"

They laugh. There are few pieces of furniture in the room: a large couch, a coffee table in front, two coffins, a bed for two, a wardrobe integrated into the back wall seen from the main door. Nothing else. A door leads to a bathroom where a beautiful marble tub stands out. Nikita contains thinking what he cannot avoid, anyway: how intimate this space feels and how much it seduces him.

Maybe, the last lesson may…

"Niki, come here. Let's talk a little before Alva examines you."

Nikita looks at Kostyantyn: he's sitting on the couch, which in turn is facing the bed. He sits next to him more seduced than ever; the LED lights change as in a stage, they go from one colour to the other; from violaceous to blue, the same blue that he has seen covering the diamond outside.

Kostyantyn's eyes, floating in the sky.

"It's a good idea to explain to you everything about our talents. Do you think you can think about it now, or do you want to wait for Alva to explain a little how to stop feeling so overwhelmed by everything?“

Excellent question. Nikita doesn't doubt:

"Tell me everything."

Kostyantyn smiles. He hugs him and draws him to him. Nikita hugs him too; on his chest, he tries to relax as much as possible.

Kostyantyn begins not without first allowing himself to comb his curls with his fingers:

"Humans have some potentials, that kind of talent that makes them skilled at something, sometimes without being able to know it. When you become a _shadow_ , because of the different nature of our energy (I will explain this point when I talk about our origin), that potential becomes a supernatural ability; we call that talent.

“Talents are measured in eight levels and classified as mental, physical and energetic. The common thing is that the _shadows_ have an outstanding talent in sixth level, on average, and the others in first or second level; there are some _shadows_ , like _mama_ and Artem, who have between four and five talents in fourth or fifth level, which makes them multi-talented; the rest of the talents are in second level, on average. Finally, there are those who have a talent in the eighth level, which makes them extremely powerful in something specific, but, in general, they don't go beyond the basic level in the rest, which may sound little, but in reality, it's a lot. Is my case; Maybe, Niki, it's yours too."

Impressed, Nikita nods. Is that what it is, then?

"Now I understand why you said that literature exaggerates: fiction vampires usually have all kinds of talent at a very high level."

"Exactly," he answers.

"And which is your talent?”

Kostyantyn lifts his jaw. He smiles with pride.

"I’m a learner, one of the three known mental talents. As the word indicates, gives me an intelligence that gives me an inhuman facility to learn, memorize and analyse information; being human, this potential appeared in me when I could learn to play the piano without taking classes."

Nikita smiles: his talent has an intellectual nature.

Nothing could seduce him more.

"Now I see why you knew so many things about science and…"

Kostyantyn squeezes his shoulder tightly. With his free hand, he holds his chin and strokes it. He brings his mouth to his with a defiant smile on his lips.

"And I know many more things, but there will be time to prove it."

Nikita laughs not without nervousness. How is it possible that Kostyantyn has such an astonishing facility to give him goose bumps?

So seductive but so idealistic…

"And which are the other talents?”

"Well…" Kostyantyn takes his cell phone out of his pocket, throws it up and, raising his hand with which he doesn't hold Nikita's shoulder, he makes it levitate before them. "On the mental level we also have telekinetics, who can move things with their mind." He pulls the cell phone with his hand and puts it back inside his pocket. "At a basic level, I can throw you _Carmilla_ or open your door with wind; to an eighth level, they can move everything, which, you can imagine, makes them very powerful."

Kostyantyn continues immediately, but in another way: looking into his eyes, holding his face, he looks at him as Michal had done in Kiev.

 _»The last mental talent is that of the telepaths: at an eighth level, they can communicate with humans and_ shadows _at great distances, only using their minds. At a basic level, like mine, I need to touch you or look you in the eye to do it, as if I need an energetic predisposition from you. On the other hand, this talent is also what allows us to observe what's not around us, as if we could move through space thanks to the energy that surrounds us and that allow us to communicate with what isn’t close of our eyes, with the environment itself: is what allowed me to find_ Carmilla _in the bookstore. It’s an ideal skill when it comes to feeding on humans, since we can verify the environment to make sure we can't be discovered._

A smile, and Nikita stops hearing the voice. Kostyantyn, laughing, continues talking, but out loud:

"Then, already in the physical group, we have the warriors, _shadows_ with an extraordinary strength. Jandiara, as I told you, is the strongest we know in Dark Silence. Also, we have the sprinters, _shadows_ that can move from one place to another in a blink; Usain Bolt has an eighth level potential, nobody has doubts about that."

Nikita laughs. Kostyantyn explains everything to him with a grace that moves him deeply.

"Third, there are the acrobats, _shadows_ that can defy gravity with their agility. At a basic level, as you have seen me doing countless times, we can move around walls and jump great distances; it allows us to move through space in impossible ways. At an eighth level, they can even float."

Nikita blinks in spite of not needing it. He has a hard time imagining himself doing all those things.

Kostyantyn continues after a caress on his right arm:

"On the physical level there is, unlike the mental and energetic levels, a fourth talent: the indestructible, ultra-resistant _shadows_ ; is the only talent that is innate, that nobody needs to learn to control. At a basic level, it makes it very difficult to injure us, because common weapons or firearms can’t hurt us; at an eighth level, they are the only _shadows_ that are able to expose themselves to the sun and survive for several minutes even when they are young, that can go through fire without dying, very useful when you have to rescue someone, for example. If they have centuries of life, they are practically invincible. Killing them is almost impossible; this is a disadvantage if they decide to end their existence as _shadows_."

"Like Nicolas de Lenfent…"

Kostyantyn nods when he remembers the crazy violinist that was Lestat's friend, who had taken his own life by throwing himself into the fire in the second book of the famous saga written by Anne Rice.

"It’s common: those who don't adapt and those who get bored of eternity choose to die permanently."

"It's sad…"

"I know."

A respectful pause, and they go on:

"And well, finally… we have the most complex _shadows_ , the energetic ones." After a moment of remaining silent, thoughtful, as if ordering his words, Kostyantyn continues: "Energetics have talents directly related to the energy that surrounds us, the one that let us to be alive despite having died as humans. Their abilities are somewhat more complicated to explain; it could be said that they are the strongest _shadows_ , since they have different ways of manipulating the energy of the Earth, humans and other _shadows_. Their mastery of energy, on an eighth level, makes them difficult _shadows_ to overcome.

“The shields are _shadows_ of vital importance for our survival; are those who allow us to live in peace among humans and keep our communities protected. At a basic level, it allows us to hide, to go unnoticed by cancelling our own energy records, in addition to what Kristian did to you, nullify human’s energy to keep them under our control. At an eighth level, a shield can nullify _shadows_ , even lots of them, take them away the ability to use their talents, and all energy record around them can disappear too, which allows that, outside the radius that their power reaches, no one can perceive any anomaly in the energy.”

“But I perceived you,” Nikita says.

“Because I didn't hide well, Niki.” Kostyantyn laughs: it's true, he didn't hide well; he couldn't, not before someone who mobilized him in that way. “In general, humans don't discover us; it's rare that they do it unless they have potentials like the one you have, that is, a perceptive one, something that doesn't happen very often; the eighth level perceptives aren't common. In addition, needs such as thirst tend to betray us, make us lose control of our powers. For that reason, you could perceive me: I hadn't fed for a long time.”

Time without feeding? Nikita frowns, but doesn't ask.

Later, he promises to himself.

“All the leaders of each Dark Silence headquarters are eighth level shields, such as Maimuna, Uzari and Hanna: their ability to hide everything that is within their range and to stop any threat in time by nullifying the power of other _shadows_ allows that someone like Carmilla cannot find the places where we protect ourselves, much less attack us. They are who protect us all."

Interesting, Nikita thinks: each talent seems to cover an innate human characteristic that complements each other. It's as if the power of the _shadows_ was designed to live in community.

Perhaps, even though they deny it and separate from each other by nonsense without meaning, humans also have that ability.

"Then, we have…" he whispers, eager to know more.

Kostyantyn frowns. He seems to look for the right words one more time.

"The perceptives and the persuasives." Kostyantyn intensifies the caress on his arm. "Perceptives can understand the energy that moves around them, as if they could see it and understand it easily; this supernatural understanding is what makes that many of them pass as learners when their level of perception is low. If they need to find someone, they can detect them by perceiving their energy, which means that if you don't have a shield nearby and you run the risk of being caught, they will find you without difficulty even when you hide with your basic talent to do it. They can feel the energy in different ways."

"Feel it?"

"Feel it. A perceptive can read your energy, which is the closest that a _shadow_ has to read minds. What they read, rather, is the energy that keeps that mind alive. You can’t hide of them; they feel all of you. If you're sad, if you hide something, if you're happy, if you have bad intentions or very good ones; they know everything about you. But since what they read is the energy that you contain and not your mind itself, many times they don't see things clearly; they see everything in disorder. It depends on how predisposed the other _shadow_ is."

Nikita stops. Can he do all of this for being a _shadow_?

“At a basic level,” Kostyantyn says, “it allows us to feel the energy registers around us, which is indispensable when taking human victims; it facilitates work in ways that you'll soon discover for yourself. Also, it's what allows us to connect in depth with other _shadows_ : those of us who have a basic domain can't read the energy as an eighth level perceptual can, but we can share our energy with that perceptive, make it readable for them.

“For being so talented and having such a high understanding of the energy that surrounds them, the most powerful perceptives pick up threats, they sense them, they are sensitive and intuitive with the environment and the people. They also have the talent to block everything from themselves, make it inaccessible to others, as Michal did with you and as Alva said she would teach you. But of course: having the power to feel the energic environment enables them a weak point: they are easy prey for the persuasives.”

Kostyantyn combs his hair with his fingers as he speaks, again; Nikita perceives that he tries to relax him, and heck, he gets it.

After a sigh, Kostyantyn continues:

"Persuasives can control your energy, manipulate it at will, make you see and feel what they want, use you like a puppet. They are _shadows_ that different communities of the world forbid to create, because a _shadow_ with this power and bad intentions can put all our existence in danger, ours and that of humans. This is Carmilla's case. At a basic level, it's what allows us to make the lights blink; it's a very basic way of manipulating the energy around us. It could be said that they are the other side of the coin of the perceptives: both can use energy, but while the perceptives ones use it to feel the other, to see the truth, persuasives use it to manipulate the other, to disguise the truth. Meanwhile, the shields are the ones that keep the balance between both."

"I see…"

"The most important of all is this: we are stronger when less lights surround us. If we are immersed in absolute darkness, our talents flourish in the most intense way. That's why Dark Silence headquarters like this one choose to illuminate very little: you maybe have noticed that you see very well in the dark.“

"Yes."

"You also feel better, move better and think better. All your senses work better now."

Nikita nods against Kostyantyn's chest. He passes one leg behind his hip and sinks him sideways into his chest. He holds him in his arms holding him by the waist; Nikita turns his face towards him.

He dies for kissing him and getting lost in it, in him.

He dies for perceive him in that intense form that Kostyantyn has described.

But he needs to know something first:

"And the origin? Why is our blood a mutation?" Nikita asks.

"Complex question…"

"I guess so."

“Well, I'll tell you, but maybe it sounds a little strange to you: keep in mind that this is what the monk explained to _mama_ ; nothing has allowed us, in centuries of research, to confirm this theory one hundred percent…”

“What?” Nikita doesn't hide the surprise that the information produces to him: is it to say that they cannot guarantee it one hundred percent?

Then…

Kostyantyn doesn't allow him think too much:

"The monk who experimented with Carmilla was sick, we know: he had an unknown type of porphyria, famous for having been, it is believed, one of the diseases that initiated the vampire myth as humans know it, a disease not yet discovered at that time and that, in some of its versions, it has some symptoms that are slightly compatible with what we are, such as photosensitivity. Also, in his monastery, he was known for performing somewhat… peculiar experiments.

“He was crazy.

“I asked _mama_ for details she had hidden from us before, she explained this to me, which in turn is what the monk explained to Carmilla and her: he had the theory that his blood needed to be purified to obtain a cure. Making primitive extractions, he tried to boil it, liquefy it, filter it, rot it, mix it with blood that, secretly, he extracted from humans with whom he performed failed experiments; nothing worked. He tried to inject blood to himself in many ways, but he didn't have the right elements to do it; he tried to drink healthy blood, animal and human blood, but nothing happened. Until one night, while thinking what else to do, a thunderstorm lit him up. What if the energy of a lightning managed to purify his blood in a way that nothing else had done?

“Giving to lightnings some divine attributes, because it was the sky who sent them, he became obsessed with the idea. While the porphyria deteriorated him, he sought to use the energy of lightnings. He despaired: none of his experiments worked, until one night, having lost reason probably because of the porphyria itself and the state in which he was sinking, he decided to leave by himself to the storm.

“He shouted to the sky among the trees that surrounded the monastery; he cried out to God, begged him to help him. He had no idea that the trees attract lightning, the lightning rods hadn’t been invented or the lightnings themselves studied exhaustively: one fell on him. Normally, it should have killed him; like Frankenstein's monster, it was that which gave him life, another kind of life, by changing the energetic dynamics of his sick blood. Lightning, in short, gave life to his sick blood and turned it into a kind of fuel.

“It made him the first _shadow_.

“Then, _mama_ told you the rest: hungry, he captured Carmilla, experimented with her and learned step by step everything that involved being the creature that he was.

“It was the energy of the lightning what it modified the monk's body and unleashed the mutation in the blood that allows us to stay alive. Presumably, as we have deduced, lightning killed the monk, but the mutation in his blood along with the lightning triggered this different logic of life."

Nikita looks at him with absolute fixity. What a twisted story.

"That's to say… Our blood is a kind of porphyria altered by the energy of a lighting, the only one that keeps us alive."

"Yes…"

“And I infer that this change of logic was what caused us, as _shadows_ , to have control over the energy that surrounds us.”

“Something like that.”

Nikita sighs. He doesn't understand.

Maybe, some data is missing, a fact that the monk had taken to the grave.

"I would like to ask you so many things, Kostya…"

"Little by little, Niki. Little by little you'll know more."

"At least we don't come from a witchcraft, a demon or something…"

"Well, demons don't need to be children of the devil; they can be people without reason or empathy."

They look at each other; they embrace naturally, because they need it. They kiss, something they haven't done for hours, and the relief that fills them is as strong as the timely lightning to which, apparently, they owed this second life.

It could be that…?

"Nikita, go and meet Alva."

They break the kiss at the same time, embarrassed: Artem looks at them from the doorway, serious. Once Nikita accepts, he retires quietly.

"I'll have to earn him."

Nikita kisses Kostyantyn one last time and goes to the room occupied by Alva and Jandiara, identical in design to the one he has already occupied with Kostyantyn. Alva waits for him in the middle of the room, with her hands extended towards him.

"You can stay if you want," Alva tells Kostyantyn and Jandiara, both at the door, behind Nikita. Artem isn’t there.

Both accept, they sit on the identical couch and promise to be silent.

Nikita walks to Alva, who waits for him in the middle of the room. When they are before each other, she takes his hands. Meanwhile, Jandiara closes the door with telekinesis.

"What did tell you Mélovin about the perceptives?” Alva asks in her sweetest voice.

Nikita is surprised to say it with such clarity:

"They are _shadows_ that can understand the energy that moves around them, as if they could see it and…"

He explains everything as Kostyantyn told him, with the same words. Is this because of his basic talent as a learner? He looks at Kostyantyn to find the answer: he nods with a smile.

"Excellent, he explained it very well." Alva urges Nikita to kneel; the LED lights that dimly illuminate the room change from magenta to red, from red to orange. They kneel before each other and Alva holds his hands with firmness. "Each eighth level perceptive has its own method to study other perceptives; mine is… Well…"

"The best of all Dark Silence," Jandiara says. "Don't be that humble, my love.”

 _My love_? Nikita is happy: then, they are a couple.

How beautiful they are.

"Good, good…" Resting importance to herself in a charming way, Alva stares at Nikita again. "My method helps to measure the extent of your power as a perceptive; it will let me know what level you are. Once I know, I can educate you in the most appropriate way given your abilities."

"All right," Nikita says; he feels shy. Alva is very beautiful and she distracts him, she does it so much that he begs to hide it in some way from her. "W-What should I do?"

All the lights go off; the last thing Nikita can see clearly is Alva's radiant smile. When he blinks in the dark, he notices what Kostyantyn has said: he sees very well.

However, he just sees Alva.

_»Close your eyes, Nikita._

He does it by listening to her inside his head, just like he listened Michal and Kostyantyn before. She, always with her mind, explains in a few words what Michal has explained to him, although in more depth, so that he could communicate with her without looking at her, always with his eyes closed. He asks if she hears him. She responds instantly:

_»Perfectly._

_»Great…_

_»Let's start._

Alva squeezes his hands.

_»What do you see?_

Nikita feels, from one second another, how a blizzard hits his face. He discovers that he's no longer in the room, but in an open space. He feels the thicker snow hitting his cheeks, he feels the cold freeze his skin.

He describes it as he can, as he has felt it; Alva only continues at the end:

_»What else do you see?_

He looks at the snow and walks through the space that extends before him: it's day, but the cold is such that there are no signs of the sun. In the distance, he sees a mountain, the same mountain that he had sworn to see in Alva's eyes when he met her. He describes it as he has felt it, again.

_»What else do you see?_

He walks further; something in the landscape looks familiar to him even when he's sure that he has never been there. He thinks, tries to remember, but he has no idea. Soon, it's as if the mountain whispered the answer, so he tells it to Alva:

_»Kebnekaise, Sweden…_

_»And what else do you see?_

The snow hits him, inclement. He turns in all directions, but he sees nothing. However, he feels something.

He feels it, he doesn’t see it.

He says it:

_»Nostalgia…_

_»And what else do you see?_

Snow, snow and snow; nothing else seems to be behind him. But there's something.

Nikita hears it, he doesn't see it.

_»Someone is crying…_

_»And what else do you see?_

Nikita runs, falls, gets up. He looks at the sky, the mountain, the ground. Everything is white, everything, absolutely everything.

But no.

In the snow, he sees them.

_»Two girls. Two blond, sweet, beautiful girls. They are holding hands, they are looking into each other's eyes._

_»And what do the girls say, Nikita…?_

He only listens to the wind, or so he believes for a moment, cold, afraid, anxious and scared to be lost in that storm. But no, he listens to them.

He feels them, actually.

_»One says ‘I'll miss you.’ The other responds ‘I'll not.’ The first question is why she's so cruel with her. The second says…_

He cries. He doesn't know why, he doesn't understand why, but it's as if a wandering spirit possessed him, as if an unknown pain pierced his heart and gets to belong to him, to be his.

It is.

_»What does she say?_

Nikita opens his eyes: the lights change from orange to yellow, from yellow to white. Alva cries the same tears that he cries.

"She says: 'because you'll always be in my heart'…"

Alva, touched, nods. Nikita doesn't listen to any question, but he feels that the pain forces him to respond:

"Your sister will always be in your heart…"

He listens a sigh of surprise from Jandiara; he feels how Kostyantyn gets excited. Alva wipes her tears and hugs him.

"You are an eighth level…"

That was it? Nikita feels that it wasn't difficult to him, not that much. He has felt everything as he described it.

His talent is that big?

“But…” he whispers.

“What I did was give you my energy, undress it before you,” Alva explains in a broken voice. “So that you could perceive it intensely, I attached it to a feeling that moves me especially: depending on the level of the _shadow_ , there are elements of my scene that are or aren't visible. That's what allows me to measure you.”

Undress the energy? Nikita looks at Kostyantyn for a moment.

Can he perceive him like that too?

He hugs her too. Kostyantyn and Jandiara congratulate him with their eyes. He thanks in the same way. Moved, only to embrace Alva and everything he has felt from her he dedicates.

"Damn perfect perceptives. They know how to love, spoiled child…" Jandiara says. She's more excited than what she usually shown to everyone. Surely, it's about seeing Alva like that, so ethereal when she uses her talent, so herself in essence.

Kostyantyn is so proud of Nikita that he hardly can stand it. His power is overwhelming and he knows it well, he has witnessed that test in other occasions, and very rarely, with very powerful _shadows_ , he had seen the last part, the one about Alva's sister, the one she had lost because of a terrible illness.

Nikita progresses. Hopefully, it will take very little to help him to understand all his abilities.

They will defeat Carmilla and they will be free, or that he craves under these dim lights that change from one colour to the other over and over again.

Nikita's talent will be helpful.

 

**…**

 

Kristian watches her run towards him as she jumps from one building to another dressed in black leather decorated with white squares: how beautiful she is. With part of her cropped brown hair, she sports golden colours in some kind of crest that she has combed to the left. When she gets to him, she smiles at him with her lips painted black.

Borysko hadn’t noticed, but he hadn't killed all the perceptives that were part of his polyamorous tribe that night. One survived.

A sixth level perceptive _shadow_ from his beloved Bulgaria, to which Carmilla had no trouble convincing about her divine mission, not after lying to her, to convince her that Dark Silence was responsible for the death of her companions.

"Poli, then…?"

She nods: the conviction that she denotes comes from the thirst for revenge.

"I heard Rob talk about Maimuna. Maimuna is the leader of the Belarusian headquarters."

"Can you assure that?”

"No, my talent doesn't allow me to assure you, but at the same time it allows me to be completely sure; I sensed Mother's anguish while listening to Rob, and we all know how close she is to that strange-eyed child, Mélovin."

"That means…"

"We have to go to Belarus: we need an eighth level telekinetic if we want to be successful, someone who enables us to infiltrate the headquarters without Maimuna blocking our skills; someone who is able to stop her with a recklessly used energy overload. I know a _shadow_ that can help us. She's very powerful! If she's still there, I think we can use her easily.”

Kristian thinks. With sadness, he recognizes:

"It's not that simple. We’ll need more help than that if we want to block that Maimuna…”

Perhaps, he should ask his superiors to intervene.

They watch, together, the snow that falls on Kiev's night. Kristian nothing craves more than going to burn the National Art Museum of Ukraine, to burn it and burn Mother, but his goddess was inclement when he suggested it:

"We can't."

"Why?”

"Because it's possible that Mother has something in her power, something that I need to recover and that I can't risk myself to lose. Something that, if I have it on my side, will give me all the power we need to fulfil our divine mission."

Hypnosis doesn't allow him to think what it that what his goddess longs to recover.

Only in one thing he can think right there, under the snow, next to Poli, with such an important mission in his hands.

Capture Nikita Alekseev.

Take him to Carmilla.

Kill Kostya, kill him so he will never get in his way again.

That he never allows him to wake up again from the lie that he no longer has the talent to see.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! If you reached this final note, thank you from the bottom of my heart. 
> 
> I'm giving my best to make a good translation and I know it has several mistakes, but I swear that I put all the passion and attention in the world to each paragraph. I can't make it better, it's impossible to improve as fast as this kind of work it demands, but I try. I will keep trying until the last chapter. I will give my best. 
> 
> I will keep learning no matter what!
> 
> So, I just want to thank Blake, Raddie and unbrokenHooligan_x for your feedback and kindness (it's extremely important to me, thank you), to Kostya Anon for always sharing my stuff and to Di for her support. 
> 
> About this chapter: Michal (Poland 2016), Poli (Bulgaria 2016), Maimuna & Uzari (Belarus 2015)... XD Sorry for being so stupid with my ESC references. It's just... I don't know, I just want to smile. This details make me laugh and smile a lot, that's why I included them. There will be another three more characters from ESC and will appear in the next two chapters. All of them are from ESC 2018, an actual goddess and two beautiful and extremely talented men. 
> 
> About Michal and Mél's "bad" relationship: Michal was jury on ESC 2018, and Poland give zero points to Ukraine, so... XD It was a funny detail, sorry for being silly. XD
> 
> About the reason behind the existence of the shadows, Niki is right about something: there's a missing detail. We will find out soon, I hope. :')
> 
> About Jandiara being so hater about Twilight, hahaha. XD If you like Twilight, please, it's just the character's opinion. She's rude, a lot, but it's just her fictional opinion. 
> 
> Sorry if the chapter it's long: I'm trying to reach the final and now we need to hurry, a lot of things need to happen and emotions need to be more intense and to be worked properly; unfortunately, this is a bad habit that I have. In the past, I was worst (I have a +500k story in my previous fandom, and a 40k oneshot XD). I'm still learning and I hope to learn until my last day. 
> 
> The next chapter will be very emotional and I hope you like it. 
> 
> And...
> 
> Gracias, Blake. A veces no sé qué haría sin vos, porque los ánimos que me das son maravillosos; apenas logro comprender que me merezco tanta bondad. Quisiera que esta historia te perteneciera, que la sintieras de tu propiedad, porque le das más cariño que el que incluso yo misma le doy. Me hace demasiado feliz poder compartirla con vos y que haya sido, de algún modo, uno de los motivos por los cuales nos hicimos amigas. Yo ya gané con eso; no necesito nada más. :')
> 
> Te quiero mucho. Posta. Mil gracias por estar, por quererme y por cuidarme.
> 
> Y cáshese po, que es linda. XD
> 
> See you next time, guys. Thank you. ♥


	18. XVII

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For Kostyantyn, it's time to say the truth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry: my English it's not good, but I work hard in each chapter, I give my best.
> 
> And I'M EXTREMELY SORRY because this chapter it's HUGE. Sorry, please. 
> 
> Thanks for giving a chance to my story. :')

_As I emerged from the porch of Santa Croce, I was seized with a fierce palpitation of the heart; the wellspring of life was dried up within me, and I walked in constant fear of falling to the ground._

**Stendhal**

* * *

 

  
"Those who are allied with power always have more luck," it says one of his two superiors; his voice, always lovely, when he speaks or when he expresses himself through the innate gift he has to sing, it's that of an angel. An Italian angel, impossibly beautiful, stronger and more talented than any _shadow_ he knows.

It has taken them too long to get to Belarus, they have had to go through a lot. Being _shadows_ and getting false documents and passages that don't harm them by schedules is more complicated than it may seem when it's necessary to go unnoticed, more when you're alone, when nobody helps you.

Not like Dark Silence, always helped by power.

"But there’s something that the allies of power will never have in their hands," Kristian concludes, not without a certain shyness, which, in front of his superiors, it’s always hard for him to disguise.

He admires them too much.

Poli, who is at his side, looks at him curiously. Before them, their superiors laugh one next to the other, both with the same Italian accent that stay in them no matter what happens; both with the same determination.

There are no more passionate _shadows_ for Carmilla's cause than the two of them.

For establishing the definitive peace.

"Which thing?" it asks with a hoarse voice the other; his tone has some implicit amusement, as if he was not taking him seriously.

Kristian contains the shame that perceiving this provokes him. He continues:

"Truth."

Both look at him, smiling.

Kristian is excited to see the honest smiles on their lips, smiles only dedicated to him.

"It’s true," the first one assures with his lovely voice, serious, determined. “We could have a lot of difficulties, but having the truth allows us to fight as an equal against anything."

Everyone looks to the front: they are in Mazyr, south of Belarus. They still need to get to Minsk, but truth will let them get there as soon as possible.

 _Because truth is a compass_ , concludes Kristian before the famous castle of the city, the Mozyr Castle; _truth is a compass that always leads to victory_.

That never allows the liars to win the battle.

 

**.**

**.**

**.**

**XVII**

He reacts, and what he does instinctively, like every nightfall, is embrace Nikita.

He finds nothing but himself.

Disturbed, Kostyantyn opens his eyes at full speed, just to find the coffin open and red lights on him, which confine him in a kind of fantasy of blood and pain. He gets up with his basic acrobat talent, he rises forward as if he were coming out of that coffin in a show (such a good idea!), and, when he stands up, the relief reaches him: he sees Nikita sitting on the couch with his hands raised towards the ceiling.

Levitating above their heads he sees _Carmilla_ , the book that Nikita couldn't avoid keeping in his bag when packing.

Nikita looks at him; loss of concentration, unlike previous times, dusk in which he had seen him practice telekinesis, doesn't make the book fall; it's the opposite. He smiles when he realizes that no, that he continues to hold the book and with full security.

"Give me the book," Kostyantyn asks.

"How?"

"Slowly…"

A laugh, and Nikita does it: moving his hands forward with a certain elegance coming from self-confidence, although with those gestures between languid and tender so typical of him, he pushes the book towards Kostyantyn; lowering them, he deposits _Carmilla_ in his hands.

"Excellent…" Kostyantyn whispers.

He approaches Nikita, who smiles like a child: how excited he is for everything he's learning! Mental abilities, like happens to all perceptives, have been the simplest to learn for him; it only took him three days to master the basics. With the energetics it had taken him more than a week, but he had achieved it, above all, thanks to the invaluable teachings of Alva, of who he didn't stop learning tricks inherent to the perceptive ones at least once a day, when they locked together in a dark room to practice, something with which Jandiara made jokes constantly.

"We lose them, spoiled child: they spend too much time together and soon will realize that they are worth more than the two of us, the rats."

"Stop…"

"You’re so cute when you get jealous!”

They had spent the last seventeen days honing his physical abilities, which used to be especially hard to control for perceptives, because each talent of eighth level gives different strengths and weaknesses for learning the other skills. But Nikita was struggling hard. He had passed whole hours falling in different parts of the Minsk’s headquarters, falling from the ceiling, from the wall, from everywhere: learn to use the speed and strength wasn't complex, not separately, but mastering acrobatics along with speed and strength seemed, in the beginning, the most impossible for him. Kostyantyn held him by the hand while helping him walk on the walls, whispering a thousand and one tips to him to keep his own gravity under control.

And Nikita fell again. And again. And one more time. Thanks to the stubbornness that made him his own because of the frustration he had with regard to acrobatics, however, the results occurred almost suddenly. He had somewhat clumsy movements, but he had confidence in himself. And he had fun! How much fun he had, as he ran through the ceiling next to him, smiling at him with the most crushing charm on the planet.

It was extremely difficult, but he has succeeded.

When he reaches Nikita, he smiles at him.

“Am I progressing?”

"You're almost ready, Niki." Kostyantyn moves his hands on either side of his own body; a second, and he lifts up Nikita and carries him with his arms. He unbuttons the shirt he's wearing and makes his face to one side staring at him.

"You earned it."

Nikita laughs, kisses him on the lips, kisses him on the neck and sinks his fangs on him with astonishing confidence, and without the shyness that had prevailed in him the first days. Kostyantyn sits on the couch to take it, to hug him, to relax and enjoy it.

He's ashamed to think about the number of things that Nikita must perceive every time he feeds on him, but he cannot do anything; he's surrendered in body and soul to his feelings. Because he knows that Nikita is waiting for the right moment to ask him questions about more intimate matters than those Kostyantyn allows him to see, on those subjects that are so hard to pronounce for him. But he's respecting him and is enjoying his learning and his company.

Kostyantyn knows he cannot ask for anything else.

They have been in Belarus for more than three weeks, and the relationship they have, at least from his perspective, continues to strengthen.

"You're happy today," Nikita says when he lets go of his neck between kisses.

Kostyantyn looks for his eyes: the reddened mouth is the first thing he notices.

"You’re still very sloppy to feed yourself."

"I do it like that so you can kiss me later."

"I see…"

Kostyantyn kisses him tenderly, but blood unleashes passion. Embraced, they kiss with their lips and with caresses, with their hands that travel and travel through the other body.

What different facets he's discovering in Nikita now that he has left so much sadness behind. He knows there are times when anxiety makes him nervous, moments of nostalgia and sadness that leave him overloaded, taciturn, with his eyes fixed on the ceiling or the floor, but in general he's progressing in leaps and bounds. He remains convinced, and that is what is helping him the most.

Also, the little habit that, thanks to the keyboard that Uzari got for them the third night at Minsk, they have acquired before turning off together: sing.

The first nights, they had sung alone the most varied repertoires. Meanwhile, Kostyantyn explained to him, finally, how he had a kind of career in the _shadow_ community of the world:

"We have our own social networks, we could say, pages inaccessible for humans in a hidden corner of the deep web with more security than the Pentagon, more or less, thanks to the great capacity of many learners that are IT specialists: there, we share all kinds of things. I share my compositions very often, whenever I can; I have many followers! Although _mama_ has more, of course, but playing as her guest for several years in different countries has made me a name in the community. I've done my own shows too! Shows in bars, clubs, halls and venues; meeting places between _shadows_. And you can do it soon, I promise. As soon as all this end, we can dedicate ourselves to music as much as we want!"

Nikita smiled at him with red tears balancing on his sweet eyelids.

"I would love that…"

Days passed, and the inevitable happened: some people, passing by the room and listening to Nikita's voice, whom Kostyantyn let sing alone with the keyboard that played for him on purpose, had begun to knock on the door. The first to do so, for Kostyantyn's surprise, was Jandiara.

"W-What a beautiful voice you have, I'm going to die for love! I can't believe it!" she said a few nights ago, stunned with a song of his own that Nikita sang with an intoxicating charm, a song about separation that, as Nikita had told him, he had made when he separated from his ex-girlfriend.

Jandiara knelt beside him, facing him; at the end of the song, she cried. Jandiara, crying for a song!

Unbelievable.

"You're an angel…" she said, moved, and Nikita thanked timidly, and Kostyantyn just nodded.

Yes: he was, he is.

Alva came minutes later, and then _shadows_ that were in the headquarters, and then even Uzari and Maimuna. Everyone was listening to him with emotion; the room, during the four songs that followed that about separation, never stopped being full.

Although not as much as Nikita's heart itself.

When everyone left and it was time to enter the coffin, Kostyantyn was too excited to stop. Nikita, on the other hand, was impressed in an extremely sweet way.

"T-They liked it…" he said standing in the middle of the room, paralyzed by how moved he was, shaking the excitement as if only that constituted him.

Kostyantyn hugged him, pushed him towards the nearest wall and kissed him with notorious vehemence.

"Let me, Niki…"

Nikita understood. Moved, he ran the collar of his clothes on the right side and showed him his skin without stopping looking into his eyes, intoxicated by him, by everything he felt for him. Kostyantyn, subjugated by everything that was happening, bit him for a single reason: he wanted to feel what Nikita was feeling in the most brutal way possible.

The happiness that filled him along with blood raised his soul to heaven.

He released his neck and kissed him once more. He was too proud.

He is.

He stops kissing him, now, and retreats to the shower almost reluctantly; leaving those lips it's getting harder and harder. In the middle of the divinely ornamented marble bathtub, under water that is practically boiling, Kostyantyn has a kind of epiphany.

Nikita is ready for the penultimate lesson.

He analyses it with the intention of making sure of it, because he cannot be blinded, not with this: he already masters everything he taught him, thing by thing, detail by detail. About his perceptive talent, Alva has told him that he already understands perfectly how to control each technique of the many that perceptives dominate, which is notorious in Nikita himself: he's very calm, he don't seem overloaded by everything he perceives as before; he has learned to block his energy from the rest, to read the energy that surrounds him, to block the naturalness of his talent to not live overloaded. Finally, his _shadow_ metabolism has already become accustomed: the blood that he keeps giving him each evening is given for pleasure, not out of necessity. Nikita only needs blood once a week.

It's time. They must return to Ukraine as soon as possible.

After showering and changing, he leaves Nikita with Alva, to practice perception, and goes to Artem's room; he finds him reading a book about persuasives of Asia written by Akita Matsuyama, the leader of Sadame, the Japanese intellectual sect.

"Getting ready?"

Artem closes the book.

"A little."

Artem doesn't get up; he remains on the sofa that is in the middle of the room. Kostyantyn plays with his own hands right in front of him. Bites his lip.

Guilt fills him.

"Forgive me for having been absent the last days, is that…"

Artem laughs; he shakes his head without stopping.

"It was time for you to grow up, Kostya. Don’t ask for forgiveness for something like this: you have to educate Nikita, he's your companion now. It's normal."

Grow up? Kostyantyn feels how his face is deformed by emotion: he adores Artem and Mother, in a different way, with the same intensity; it's true that Nikita's appearance in his life will change many things: his idea is to leave Mother's entourage, move to Odessa, travel with Nikita to different places, learn things, enjoy, sing. Of course, he will have to talk to Nikita first, his opinion matters more than any other, but it's true.

Things are going to change.

"It was time for you to cut the cord,” Artem says, smiling. "You have spent too many years embittered, keeping your distance from everyone with a shyness that, rather, was antipathy, and fear, and immaturity. Now you are changing, and for good: it shows that your opening isn’t only with Nikita, but with all. Even with Jandiara. You needed to let yourself go more, do it under the stage too; you always failed to stop locking yourself in and look beyond, to stop seeing bad people in the others, to see the potential of others. Now you are doing it."

Kostyantyn nods. Soon, an unlikely amount of fear stalks him.

As usual.

"But _mama_ and you…"

It's too hard to cut the cord.

"We’ll be fine as long as you are well. But I know you, Kostya: you came to tell me something else. You don't plan the emotional moments."

Kostyantyn smiles: it's true, he never plans them.

Everything it's hard for him.

"I want to… ask for an opinion. I think Nikita is ready to feed on humans."

Artem, who has never moved the book he was reading from his lap, sets it apart. He crosses his legs and arms before Kostyantyn. He sinks in the seat to observe him better.

"Take him the final lesson," he says to him.

"Should I? Is it not dangerous that we go outside considering that Carmilla surely yearns for our silence?“

"If you trained him well, both can act under the energy protection that gives you your basic talent as shields: no one should feel you or put you in trouble, not if you take the appropriate precautions. If you think Nikita is ready, well, try it."

A chill run through him; nervousness blooms on his skin.

So…

"Okay." he responds with a broken voice.

Kostyantyn threatens to leave, but he doesn't succeed. Artem, of course, notices it.

"What else do you need?"

"I…"

"Kostya, what's happening?"

"It's…"

A laugh, and Artem gets up to look at him closer, with fixity. Kostyantyn runs his eyes; he knows that, even if he doesn't want to, Artem will understand the gesture as what it is.

Mere insecurity.

"Admit it," Artem asks. "Thirty-two years, Kostya, and we talk about Nikita, who has you idiot like no one else has ever had you."

"Hey!"

Artem laughs.

"I understand your bad memories, but you have plenty of reasons to stop looking back. Also, if you think we don't notice that you're dying for it, you underestimate us all; we can feel the tension in the air: you eat him with your eyes, almost as much as he, more comfortable with the situation, eats you.”

Kostyantyn goes one step back.

"What are you talking about?!" he asks, embarrassed.

"Have you explained anything about that to him?”

Kostyantyn cannot hold Artem's gaze; he drops his pupils to the ground.

Clearly, they talk about sex.

"A little," he admits.

 _Almost nothing_ , he adds in his own mind.

"I know it's because of Kristian, Kostya, but I feel like you're wrong."

"Why?"

"Because you're distrusting Nikita, and you're underestimating him too.”

Kostyantyn manages to look at Artem again: how serious he looks, how seriously he talks.

"Why do you say that?" he asks, however, because he doesn't understand where Artem intends to take this issue.

"Because you don't think that you have no reason to be afraid. It’s normal to get nervous, but to believe that everything will turn out bad is another matter. Nikita is different from Kristian, it shows. Also, I think that he's more mature than you in some aspects. I think he's someone you can trust. Stop putting the pressure on yourself is what you should try in this situation, do you understand? I'm sure it will unite you both. Besides…"

“What?”

"A battle is coming, and a horrible one. I know you know, Kostya: Nikita is ready and you’re ready too. We don't know what will happen, if we will survive Carmilla's attack. Don't reject this and stop pressing you so much; don't deprive yourself of this before returning."

Artem's words fall deep in Kostyantyn: it's true, maybe they will not survive. He doesn't want to think about it, he cannot, it hurts, but it's true: they may be lost forever.

Maybe, the promise it couldn't be fulfilled.

He smiles with an anguish fused with a longing inside his chest. To have him with him, to have him and that nothing else matters.

Deserve him before that.

Earn him by confessing the truth.

"You're right."

"I know, I always have it.”

They smile at each other.

"Sometimes it's worth thinking less, Kostya. It's hard for the learners to understand this, but it's the truth. Pay attention to me: think less. When you achieve it, you can lose yourself in what is worth for you now."

Frowning with tenderness, Kostyantyn nods. Artem is right, he must stop thinking. If Nikita approves his next lesson, then…

Only one thing will remain to be taught, the most special of all when it's the most vehement love what joins two _shadows_. That's what he thinks when he leaves.

He has a lot to do. A lot, if he wants everything to go as well as Nikita deserves.

This time, it must be this way.

As he walks away, without perceiving it at any time, Kostyantyn is observed by Artem, who remains leaning on the threshold of his room. He only leaves, heading to the opposite side, when Kostyantyn disappears completely.

It's time.

**…**

 

He releases Alva after sharing a special memory of his childhood through the nakedness of his energy, a moment that perhaps for many could be ephemeral, trivial, silly, but that means too much to him.

The first time he saw Queen on television; the first time he wanted to sell his soul to music.

Alva wipes a tear while smiling.

"There is nothing purer than love, Nikita," she says as she caresses his hands with her thumbs. "Never dare to think that something that has meaning for you is stupid, not when your feelings are like that, so pure, so immeasurable."

Nikita thanks by nodding.

It's difficult to be perceived like this, to such an intimate point, but how impossible it's not to be amazed by this gift that he shares with Alva, this one that he can barely believe that he deserves to have, that of feeling _everything_ about everyone, that of feeling too much, to a point of ecstasy, of perdition, of overdose.

Until needing to feel no more.

He gets up from the floor, where he has been practicing with Alva, and walks around the room blocking the restlessness that fills him.

Undress the energy…

Not to ask Kostyantyn to undress his energy for him has been difficult, especially when contemplating, next to Alva, the extent of his own abilities, some that, when he thought he perceived everything about him in the chapel, Nikita had no idea how to use.

Contrary to what he believed that time, he felt almost nothing on Kostyantyn's part.

He already knows how deep he can sink into feelings, how much he can come to feel them as his own thanks to the fluctuations of the energy exposed by the other. He already knows, also, to perceive when somebody puts a stop before his talent.

He already knows, now, that Kostyantyn hasn't let him see almost anything, only the most superficial.

From his perspective, diametrically opposed to that of Kostyantyn, their relationship is going through a delicate moment.

He sighs. He's worried that he has said so little, because he has spoken about some things, but not about everything that, for some reason, he constantly hides, what lies behind an energetic wall every time he drinks from him, a wall that Kostyantyn himself raises with his basic talent of perception. He thinks that they are matters that are difficult to him and that is why he has been more than respectful of his silence, but, in the face of the imminent danger that is looming, that incarnated by Carmilla, he begins to get impatient without really wanting it.

He doesn't want to go back to Ukraine without knowing why Kostyantyn isn't being honest.

He doesn't want to die permanently, not without first being able to…

"Nikita, can I speak to you?” Artem asks from the door.

Nikita doesn't hide his surprise: at most, Artem has spoken to him three times since he has known him, and each conversation has been remarkably brief. He wanted to earn him, but Artem seems impenetrable.

Until today?

He follows him by answering yes; they end up locked in Artem's room, who invites him to sit next to him on the sofa. Nikita does it, sits down trying to stay calm, but he can’t: Artem intimidates him for the impenetrable that he feels. Until he extends a hand, and Nikita looks at it without understanding.

"I'm inviting you to meet me a little," Artem says. "Alva told me that you’re very good at the energetic trance."

A slight smile stands out on his lips; Nikita is more excited than he tolerates because of the offer. He wants to get along with Artem, above all, because he loves Kostyantyn. He knows how important is Artem to him; this, perhaps, could be the beginning.

He takes the hand knowing what Artem is referring to: the energetic trance is what has most excited him to learn as a _shadow_.

What he has just allowed Alva to do: read the undressed energy of the other and, therefore, experience with all the senses the thoughts that fluctuate in the energy and the emotions that these thoughts produce. It consists of reading the energy of those who openly allow it by offering a hand, the eyes or both; it's the definitive connection tool, because it allows a perceptive _shadow_ to make the energy of the other his own.

The most brutally honest way to experience empathy for another being, that's what it's about.

To put himself in their shoes, literally.

Artem smiles sadly, contradicting himself in a gesture of emotion that is unrecognizable in him, and Nikita stops seeing him as he sinks into the intense energetic nakedness that is so ready before him.

He just sees war.

Blood.

Destruction.

Death.

He only sees and feels impotence; from Artem's eyes, feeling what Artem felt before that unfortunate image of the past, he feels everything as if he were Artem. Because he sees and feels the desolation, that the mist that surrounds him and freezes him infects him.

He sighs, he contains human tears, he seeks to escape while running between bodies, between life and death; what unbearable impotence fills the heart of the person who makes him see this sad image. But he stumbles, falls, and all the explosions that kept him stunned stop at the same time.

He looks at the sky: it's grey.

It's grey, like the sadness he feels inside his heart.

Until he sees Mother under the sky, with the skin burning under the sun lines that reach her; around her, everything is in greyscale. With other clothes, with other hairstyle, with other hair colour and speaking a very untidy Russian, but her at last.

She's desperate.

"Someday, this nightmare will end… I'm sure!" she says crying blood.

"I’ll not be alive by then…" Artem says looking at her; his voice shows, as broken as it sounds, how intense is his despair. He doesn't understand why she cries blood and not tears, but he doesn't care.

Nothing cares anymore.

Nikita soon recognizes the feelings that Artem is infecting him: it's the despair of not having more desire to live.

Of having surrendered.

Of not having anything to lose.

"You could be…" Mother answers. "You could be, Artem… You could be with me!"

And Nikita sees Artem again, Artem smiling sadly next to him, hands tightly wrapped in a powerful empathy.

Nikita feels that the words form themselves in his mouth:

"You were in a war…" Nervous, Nikita stops. He forces himself to continue. "In…”

"The civil war before the creation of the Union." Artem releases a sigh; the nostalgia, one provoked by feelings that Nikita perceives as complexes, shines in his pupils. "Mother and I had met some time before, in a tavern: we shared a very intense conversation about history and politics, then another, then another, until she knew that I had left, that I had gone to fight for what I thought was right for my people, and she decided to expose herself to the sun to stop me. She found me dying, the others believed that I was dead. She offered me the gift because, according to her, she liked me; she said she sensed a lot of… idealism in me, one of those idealisms that she considers important, perfect for organizations like Dark Silence, that seek peace between humans and _shadows_. Since then, grateful for all the hope that I got from her at the worst moment of my life, I'm her right hand."

Nikita smiles.

"Mother is a good person…" he whispers, too overwhelmed by the truth to say anything minimally useful.

He didn't expect this kind of revelation.

"She is."

Artem releases him, but not abruptly; he does it, more than anything, out of respect for his personal space, probably because he feels how overwhelmed he is. Nikita accepts the gesture with the corresponding kindness.

"I'm closed and quite shy," Artem says, "I have seen a lot, a lot of pain, and I have felt the most unbearable injustice. That's why, and for him by himself, is that Kostya means so much to me: he reminded me of another part of what it means to live, a part that, too immersed in transcendental conflicts, too passionate about ideas and concepts, I had left forgotten, the one that refers to love, empathy, relationships, feelings… Often, the great world conflicts, those of a political nature, leave the emotive part relegated; we feel that our everyday problems are stupidities next to what encloses us, the context of a country, a region, the world itself… But they’re not."

Thoughtful, Nikita frowns.

"They’re not?" he asks.

Because, as with the memory of Queen, he has always felt that guilt, that need to lower his feelings towards those who afflict others.

Feel them, yes, stupidities.

"They’re not." Artem smiles too; he seems thoughtful. "There are as many realities as people; none feel the same, none look at the world equally. Each person understands the world from their own perspective, with their own feelings and ways of thinking, which, in turn, are formed from their experiences, opportunities, context and education. It's a kind of feedback between each person and the world in which they live; we can't expect everyone to see the world as we see it. Even if we wanted to, no, we can’t.

“Kostyantyn grew up in a world that was adverse in one of its facets, the school; the pain of that experience ended up defining him. Having lived through those difficult years, everything that followed was moulded, in him, from that adversity: it's difficult to him to value himself, more than he thinks it is. Thanks to him, I understood that we can't underestimate those problems, that we shouldn't consider them stupidities. How, if they define who we are in our own roots? How, if they define who we will be out there, in the world that we belong…"

Nikita feels a kind of violent admiration; Artem's words seem to him of a privileged lucidity. It shows that, despite how silent and shy he is, despite going unnoticed most of the time, he has a vast inner world.

He can tell that he saw everything he saw.

"Sometimes I feel like he's like a child," Nikita confesses, almost without knowing why, or yes: he feels he can talk about this with Artem. "When I drink from him, I perceive his character, that he has it, and all that charisma that he constantly spills; behind that image, which is cold despite being attractive, I perceive a lot of purity…"

"It's our fault, Mother's and mine."

"What?"

"He told you how we found him?"

Distressed, Nikita denies.

"Not yet.”

"Oh…" Artem smiles with a certain tenderness that Nikita finds captivating. Somehow, he wants to hug him. "Nor did he tell you under what circumstances Kristian turned him into a _shadow_ , right?"

"Right…"

“I see…” Thoughtful, Artem takes a few seconds before continuing. “Mother and I are fond of him for many reasons, especially for that purity that he hides so well and is so different from everything that she and I lived, all those wars, deaths and pain: we wanted to save him no matter what happened, save that purity… That made us spoiled him, over-protect him. That, and his unresolved internal conflicts, made him like that, a person who shelters too much in one facet of his personality in pursuit of taking care of the world the other, the one that isn’t valued, the most fragile."

"The most valuable…"

"I don't know: I think both are valuable, both are genuine. But Kostya hides a side of his being, tries to suppress it, to silence it, when it's an innate part of himself too. He should allow himself to live in peace, be both of him at the same time, understand that being a facet doesn't kill the other; understand that they are all him, Kostyantyn."

Two sides, two facets.

Nikita understands it without trying:

"Does this have something to do with the fact that almost everyone calls him _Mélovin_? He hasn’t told me about that either."

Artem nods. There is some impression in him.

Apparently, Kostyantyn has confessed less than what Artem believed. Nikita finds sad that fact.

Why he’s not honest…?

"Precisely about that it is,“ Artem explains. “Everything in Kostya has to do with that difference, with those two facets in conflict. I'm sure he'll talk about this to you soon, Nikita: it's hard, but I know he can."

Nikita nods too. He thanks, with his eyes, everything Artem has told him. He doesn't think he's intrusive; he feels that his perspective helps him strengthen his own, that knowing Kostyantyn from someone else, someone so important, reinforces beliefs that he already had about him.

"Thanks for…" he whispers. Before his eyes, he feels that Artem looks different.

He feels that he pierces his eyes without any difficulty, the opposite of what he felt at the beginning.

The opposite of what he feels about Kostyantyn.

"No," Artem takes his hand again. He squeezes it, and Nikita feels that he's filled by a very powerful, very immense, very important love.

He discovers, looking at him, that Kostyantyn is whom Artem loves the most in the world. And it's not love like the one Kostyantyn has for Artem, that of friend to friend, of son to father, of brother to brother; neither is love of lovers.

It's more.

"Kostya is a reminder to me: he's that representation of everything that I must never forget; that, when I try to be part of the solution, I'm fighting for people like him, humans or _shadows_ ; I'm fighting for the good people that still exist, those who still allow themselves to feel despite how difficult is the global situation in which they are."

Nikita cries the tear that he has no way to contain, not after what he has just heard.

"He's your inspiration…"

"Everyone's. That idiot pretends that he knows, but he doesn't realize how special he is…"

Laughs; they think alike.

"I know…"

Without further ado, they share an accidental sigh; how much they love him and how much that feeling overwhelms them. Nikita doesn't need to say what he feels; it's enough to transmit it to Artem, who nods when he perceives it.

"I know you'll do it,” he tells him before Nikita leaves.

He knows that he will take care of him, that he will take care of that purity and he will not let it disappear.

However, Nikita, after this unexpected conversation, understands it more than ever: he needs to perceive Kostyantyn. If he wants to help him, he needs to earn his trust. And how much he loves him, and how much he loves everything that involves him, from the smallest details of his body, like that mole above his left eyebrow or the length of his clear lashes to those feelings so pure that he expresses when he sings; from the way he looks at him to the way he has to talk, to feel, to think, to move.

He's a jewel, the diamond that floats between blue lights, an ocean contained in a specific point. Nothing else in life he longs more, now, to stop being blinded by its brightness.

That he can look at him as he is, look at him while he feels him, while he has him, while he loves him with his heart and body, with everything that constitutes him.

He knows that he has to bring up the subject, that he cannot allow Carmilla to take away the opportunity to experience the most transcendental feeling in history in the arms of the most wonderful person who he has had the opportunity to meet, the one who, like Artem, fills him with inspiration.

He doesn't suspect, walking down the corridor going to the main hall of the headquarters, that Kostyantyn has his own plans.

"Niki," Nikita listens behind him in the middle of the corridor. There's no one around.

He turns around: Kostyantyn smiles at him with implacable tenderness. He's like a child, yes. He's a boy behind that wall of coldness sweetened with natural charisma.

"I heard they're going to have a party here," Nikita says, as if to relax the air that, between them, feels tenser every day, for what is still pending. "Maimuna asked me if I wanted to sing, she really likes one of my songs, but I think I'm not ready…"

Kostyantyn smiles as the child he is always in the background, that who Nikita cannot stop seeing when he sees him.

Less now.

"Which song?"

"’Okeanami stali’," he says with demarcated modesty.

"One of my favourites too, it's sensational! You should sing it, Niki…"

"I promise that I’ll cheer up soon," Nikita replies; Kostyantyn notes him convinced, relaxed, without conflicts. "Also, although Maimuna says that I shouldn't worry too much about that, I don't want to be noticed. I'm not saying I'm going to be noticed because of my song or something, but…"

Although being subtly dismayed, Kostyantyn nods.

"Good point," he says. "It's better to leave it for another time, even if there is no reason to worry." Playing with his fingers, squeezing one of his hands with the other, Kostyantyn is happy, in some way, about Nikita's refusal.

Everything seems to indicate that nothing remains, more than the obvious.

"Niki…"

“What?"

"Do you want to go out with me?"

Nikita, who looks at him from the side, without turning towards him completely, does so.

"Go out?"

"I'll explain it to you on the way." Satisfied by expressing a mystery that he finds elegant in a boyish way, Kostyantyn shows him all the teeth. His charisma attacks Nikita, who no longer finds words to explain the complexity of his own feelings. "Go, wrap up."

Minutes later, covered in rigorous black, colour which most of _shadows_ use to pass more unnoticed in the depth of the night, they run through the walls of the different buildings in Minsk. Nikita continues to feel a fierce love for this country, a fascination that he feels in the most honest part of his heart; in the shadows, dodging the lights of the streets, nothing manages to fascinate him more than Kostyantyn, who runs so free, with such elegance, while looking at the screen of his cell phone, which has Google Maps open.

Google Maps…?

Nikita begins to suspect when he remembers things that Kostyantyn has previously explained to him about…

"Here," Kostyantyn says when braking on the edge of a building, on a terrace lost in the middle of Minsk. "Are you ready, Niki?"

Nervous from one second to the other, Nikita feels stupid for asking:

"For what?"

Kostyantyn looks into his eyes; Nikita perceives pride, love, confidence.

Fear?

"To graduate as a _shadow_ ," Kostyantyn says when smiling, "to kill a human for the first time…"

Nikita opens his eyes as much as he can.

He has waited too long for this moment. Too long, especially for that detail that he does manage to perceive in Kostyantyn when one drinks from the other between kisses made half of love, half of passion.

But why is Kostyantyn afraid…? Nikita asks himself at the precise moment he agrees.

Why?

**…**

 

"Are you sure?!"

"Yes, mom: I felt it perfectly."

"But why now and not before…? It's the tenth time you've been there! “

“Who knows!” Michal laughs with his characteristic charm. He encloses Mother in his arms next to the transparent piano with neon lights. “My theory is that they are unprotected: someone who kept the place safe is no longer with them.”

Mother squeezes him.

"The shield!" she shouts.

Michal caresses her face with his fingers.

"The shield, exactly… Or some perceptive with a talent as high as mine, that's almost a ninth level.”

When listening to him, Mother is silent.

That's almost a ninth level…

“The Italians…” she whispers.

Michal frowns.

"What do you mean?”

Mother doesn't answer. On the piano, is Citrus. She looks into his eyes as if only he could give an answer to her. She pets him; Citrus purrs looking at her with narrowed eyes.

Everything sounds like an ambush. Why would Carmilla expose herself to the danger to be found?

Why, if they have protected themselves so much, don't…?

Mother covers her mouth when she understands it. Michal holds her, stops her from falling to the ground.

But how?! Only a Dark Silence's affiliate could…

“I have to tell Artem…” she whispers as she runs to Hanna's office at full speed.

**…**

 

Uladzimir Ivanov has a quiet and happy life in the central area of Minsk. He drives the cash register at the bar on the corner of his building, plays football with his friends and occasionally dates Maryia Kovaleva, his neighbour from the third floor; he's one more person in a sea of people, a man of forty-five who stands out for his meter ninety-nine and his grey eyes accompanying the short blonde hair partially covered by grey.

No one suspects.

The bar closed half an hour ago, but he crossed Maryia at the elevator; they will meet again next Friday, they will spend the night together in her apartment. Once on the sixth floor, Uladzimir enters his apartment.

When he closes the door behind him, he leans against it and sighs. He turns on the light on the switch on his right.

Finally.

Uladzimir walks to his computer located before the door, on the opposite wall of his humble apartment. He turns it on, takes out his cell phone, sends a message and, when he turns to go for something to eat in the kitchen, the light blinks and goes away.

"What the…?" he murmurs: there is light outside, he sees it thanks to the street poles that, despite throwing light on his apartment, fail to illuminate enough.

He tries to approach to the window; he doesn't reach it.

He never will.

The light blinks again, it does so in front of his eyes; between blinks, he sees a figure before him, a figure that, for the unexpected, it closes his stomach for exposing him to the most lacerating fear. The reaction is to shout: he cannot do it.

The light doesn't stop blinking, but it does it quickly, so it allows him to see enough; Uladzimir tries to move.

He cannot either.

That's the strangest creature he has ever seen in his life.

Terrified by feeling how hard it's to breathe, unable to move as if an energy kept him petrified, he sees how the creature approaches: is a young man of some twenty years, not very tall, thin, pale in a worrying way. He has an almost androgynous face, he doesn't look masculine in the way that Uladzimir considers as the standard, but evading his dark eyes seems impossible.

He falls on his knees before that young man, who has his right hand raised to the front. He reaches down to him, but doesn't touch him.

"Uladzimir Ivanov, forty-five years, clandestine distributor of child pornography," the young man whispers with a notorious disgust, with a look as cold as ice.

Uladzimir tries hard to speak. Without knowing how, he succeeds:

"T-That’s not true!" he swears, shaking.

"You know it is…" the young man replies, who among the flashing lights looks like a beautiful ghost. Beautiful, but gloomy.

Angelic, but demonic.

Uladzimir feels how he stands him up against his will, at the speed that the hand that the young man has extended demands. Desperate, he tries to regain control over his own body.

He fails.

"You're wrong!" Uladzimir exclaims. "You’re looking for Yan… Yan, my neighbour! He told me he would come in a moment… If you wait for him, I can help you to…!"

The lights go away, no sound is perceived; Uladzimir feels how something hurts his neck.

"No…!" he shouts.

Arms surround him, squeeze him until his bones break. Uladzimir cries: there is no escape.

They caught him.

After so many years in the shadows of the clandestine market, they caught him.

Inhales, exhales; the body falls inert to the ground.

"Monster…" Nikita whispers on the verge of tears.

He trembles: it's his first time, his first human victim, finally. He has only drunk from Kostyantyn, he has only felt Kostyantyn, never an energy like this, so dark and inferior.

But what a morbid pleasure runs through his veins.

His talent has allowed him to feel in detail Uladzimir's energy: he was a despicable being. The police had found him just a few hours ago after ten years of investigation. His crimes were too many; the punishment was urgent.

Nikita doesn't need more evidence: he doesn't feel guilty for having killed him. How to feel it, if he had been able to see, in his blood, everything he had done? Every life ruined, every victim.

"Monster…" he repeats.

As he supposed since he began to consider becoming a _shadow_ , killing this human has opened his eyes: it feels different, because his nature is different.

These are the rules of the game and nothing about this, because he's more _shadow_ than human when he feeds, is hard enough to accept.

Kostyantyn approaches him, hugs him from behind, kisses his curls.

"I'm proud of you, Niki," he says with emotion, "you understood too well what it's all about. You didn't get confused, you didn't hesitate. You are a complete _shadow_ , more complete than myself…"

Nikita looks at the corpse: no, he doesn't feel guilt.

The pleasure that emptying that monster has caused him cannot be compared with anything he has felt before.

It makes happy the _shadow_ that now he is knowing that he has eliminated one more monster from the world.

And that's all.

"His friend is coming, I feel it," Nikita says from one second to the other.

Kostyantyn kisses him on the curls once again; he also feels him.

"You see him?”

Nikita uses his basic telepathic talent, the one that allows him to see what isn’t before his eyes.

"He's in the elevator, two floors down us."

Yan Ignatchuk, thirty-three years old. Uladzimir's partner in the business.

Another monster.

Nikita knows that it's time, that this is the perfect moment. Knowing it, he turns towards Kostyantyn at supernatural speed.

"Let's share him," he proposes.

Kostyantyn watches him not without surprise. Paralyzed by the offer, he feels blank for a significant moment.

"I felt your guilt drinking your blood, letting you drink from me," Nikita says, serious, moved; there is a certain shyness in him, too. "I know that sometimes you feel guilt for have to kill humans, that you question who is the monster, and I don't understand it at all, but… I was waiting to do this to be sure what I think about it. And it's this, Kostya: they are the monsters, beings like them are monsters… Let me help you feel it, please!”

And Nikita reduces the lights when he perceives how someone opens the door. It's Yan, of course.

Kostyantyn doesn't leave the shock: he knew that Nikita had felt things when drinking from him, but not that he had felt that. He has never talked to anyone about that guilt. Artem and Mother know it, they feel it, but he has never said it out loud.

Nikita takes his hand while Yan, who has noticed that there is no light, wanders through the darkened apartment.

_»I’ll help you, Kostya. Please…_

_»Niki…_

_»Please, let me help you!_

And Nikita releases him, and turns towards Yan, and makes the lights blink in a ghostly ferocity. Yan doesn't get to scream; Nikita silences him with telekinesis, he reaches him by moving at high speed, he catches him with his strength and moves towards Kostyantyn with a jump that would be impossible for a human. He holds him back against his chest and shows his neck to Kostyantyn.

"Let's go, my love," Nikita says. Kostyantyn feels that his heart explodes at the epicentre of the concept when he sees, on Nikita's lips, the sweetest of smiles. "Come on…"

Kostyantyn, this way, before the smile and Yan's neck, understands it.

Thirty-two years later, but he understands it completely.

The monsters are the ones who are happy to hurt. Like this damn criminal, like the one Nikita just killed.

Monsters are those who have no heart, not the others.

Not them, who do it to survive.

Not Nikita, who smiles at him like an angel after calling him _my love_ for the first time. A _shadow_ like him; a _shadow_ that, with or without reason, sees in his victims monsters that someone has to stop.

He smiles in response. A second, and his fangs sink into the left side of Yan's neck, who cannot scream, who cannot get free.

The one who, by his blood, transmits all his monstrosity.

Nikita bites on the right side, sinks his fangs from behind. Yan lies locked between them.

Nikita stretches the right hand, attracts Kostyantyn’s left hand and holds it firmly by interlacing his own fingers with his.

_»Feel it. Don't lock yourself, don't blame yourself… Just feel his energy and you'll see that you've always been wrong._

_»Niki…_

_»Feel it with me, my love…_

And Kostyantyn feels it, he perceives the cruelty, the lack of empathy, the degree of pain that this unfortunate being has caused by his clandestine activity. He feels it, damn! He feels it not only thanks to Nikita's hand, which transmits his own feelings of disgust and fury; he feels it himself from the blood that he so avidly drinks, that he spills over his mouth thanks to the brutality of his fangs, between light and darkness.

Killing is part of their nature, is the reality they must accept.

To free himself from his aquatic prison, he needs to accept that…

The corpse falls, empty.

"You’re a _shadow_ ," Kostyantyn repeats.

"You too," Nikita answers.

 _And there is nothing wrong with that,_ Kostyantyn concludes almost without believing it, remembering Alva, when Alva promised to teach Nikita how to help him.

She has done it. With this, she has done it.

Has she done it with the rest too…?

He smiles: Nikita doesn't have his mouth stained, not this time.

"You have done it perfectly, everything, you have used all your skills with mastery."

Nikita smiles too: he's satisfied.

"I learned from the best."

"Alva?"

They laugh.

"As well…"

They laugh more.

"I love you, Niki…" Kostyantyn says because he can, and then they proceed with the bodies.

He explains the procedure to Nikita: they must give notice to the local police so that they take care of the rest, this is how this is handled in Belarus, although other countries get used to other methods. He gives examples like Ukraine, Colombia and Canada, explains each case, and they leave the department after a brief communication with the police by jumping out the window, running up the walls and running and jumping from building to building. Kostyantyn, as he explains everything, contemplates how Nikita moves before him: there is always a kind of sweet awkwardness in his movements, enhanced by how he hides his hands inside the sleeves of his coat, as if he couldn't stop exposing how shy he is.

He moves like the angel he is, because clumsiness doesn't take away from his existence all the innate charm that he possesses.

"I'm happy," Nikita tells him without stop moving. Kostyantyn has never seen him like this. "I never thought I could do all this, do things that work, that help in some way… I always felt so weak!"

Kostyantyn listens attentively: there is emotion in his voice, in his movements, in everything that he is and what he expresses.

Nothing but the night sky surrounds them, everything looks greyscale around, everything but Nikita, who shines in the brightest colours that Kostyantyn has ever seen.

Nikita stops on the edge of a building; Kostyantyn stops a few seconds later, next to him.

They look at Minsk in silence, under the snow that falls from the sky in slow motion. The world seems to become the most transcendental one, to change from the occasional, from the ephemeral, to the true.

It’s a signal.

"Thank you, Kostya…" Nikita says, and he doesn't contain the emotion that he denotes through the two tears of blood that slide down his face. "I was so tired of myself, I needed so much to feel alive, to get out of that wheel in which I couldn't stop turning around, to feel free and happy. I longed so much…

"Thank you for turning me into a _shadow_ and for allowing me to change my own life forever…"

When he hears that, Kostyantyn covers his mouth with his hands. He turns his face towards Nikita, he looks at him with his unequal eyes, he understands.

He understands everything with a clarity that surpasses him.

There's no point in feeling guilt about anything. Nor for being a being that lives at the expense of monsters, nor for having allowed Kristian to kill Nikita, not for nothing.

He doesn't have to feel guilt for what he is.

Nor for what he feels.

Nor for…

With explicit urgency controlling his movements, Kostyantyn takes Nikita in his arms and kisses him as if it were the first time, or the last, trembling at the mere contact of their skins, feeling how only to touch him is enough for him to explode, to become ashes by touching the sun itself. He looks at him, he looks at Nikita caught in his arms: he looks fragile, but he's strong.

He's the answer to everything.

He's that mirror that allows him to see himself from another perspective, the one that enables him a new talent.

That of not feeling any guilt for being this one that he is and accept his own true nature.

He's a _shadow_ , but he feels.

Without opening his mouth, Kostyantyn clenches his jaw: Mélovin is pleading, Kostya too. Both need Nikita, Nikita like this, fragile, delicate, sweet, precious. Kostya to feel it.

Mélovin to set on fire all around him.

"Let's go back," Kostyantyn asks when releasing him.

Nikita runs alongside him for the rest of the journey, the two of them in silence. While running, a thousand questions are asked in Nikita's mind: what kind of tension did he notice in Kostyantyn when he embraced him? Why does he not stop feeling fear?

Something, he discovers, it feels different. Something has changed.

They soon arrive at the headquarters, which they find, in its main hall, full of _shadows_. There is a stage before the diamond, musicians play a song that contains rhythms that Nikita doesn't find common, not in Eastern Europe. In the middle of the stage, a beautiful woman with black and short hair moves her hands slowly while singing in a language that Nikita doesn't recognize, covered by an exquisite golden dress that makes her look like a goddess.

Behind all the _shadows_ that surround the stage, about two hundred, Nikita and Kostyantyn meet Alva, Jandiara and Artem. They don't talk to the first two: they are kissing each other, embraced, delivered to the slow and passionate, exotic rhythm of the song. Nikita smiles: he loves to see them together, he feels hypnotized before them and what one feels for the other.

He wants the same, the same honesty.

“I come back in a moment," Kostyantyn says as he lets go of Nikita's hand.

After that, Nikita sees how he touches Alva when he passes next to her; Alva stops kissing Jandiara, she apologizes to her and leaves with Kostyantyn without showing any discomfort.

Was the touch a way to say something with telepathy?

Jandiara laughs. Artem too, although he looks a little nervous; Nikita, without understanding, just looks at the stage, the one where the golden woman continues with her passionate song.

He feels that her voice, sensual in a purely aesthetic way, as soft as velvet, transports him to another plane of existence.

"Which language is this?" he asks Artem with almost no voice.

He responds instantly:

"Albanian. Do you want to know what she says?”

They look at each other; Nikita nods without understanding why Jandiara seems to contain a laugh.

Artem holds his hand, smiling, and whispers with telepathy the meaning of the chorus:

_»Return to your land: you know that a heart is waiting for you._

Nikita cannot see nothing, absolutely nothing, more than the golden woman moving between white lights, from whom those lyrics emerges, whose meaning moves him not only for the translation, but for what, with the beautiful and mature voice, she expresses. He understands that she speaks about a country, he knows that this is the metaphor, but he cannot help but feel it as Artem has told him earlier, from his own experiences.

It reminds him of Kostyantyn.

He is, Nikita himself, the heart that will always wait for him, wherever, whenever. That who wants to be there for him.

The place where he can always return. Just as music will be for both always, the home they can share forever.

The end of loneliness.

He contains the tears before the golden goddess that sings unknown words.

Why Kostyantyn isn't honest with him…?

**…**

 

He embraces Alva in the middle of the corridor, he squeezes her as he never has done before, not with her, not with someone who wasn't, on this side of existence, Mother, Artem or Nikita. He hates himself for shaking profusely, but he cannot help it: it's too much.

He didn't think he could get to this moment like this, with this nervousness that suffocates him in the physical and the conceptual.

Alva looks at his eyes without letting go of him; she cries without stopping.

"Just jump," she says. "As I promised, I taught him how to help you. I didn't tell him that, but I did it, I taught him how to help you with guilt and everything else.”

And that’s why he has had to seek Alva's advice, it has been more than obligatory.

He doesn't know how to do what, in a few minutes, he will do.

Because to turn humans into _shadows_ hasn't been the only lesson that he has never accepted from anyone.

"Thank you, Alva…" he whispers, feigning seriousness, coldness, detachment.

Scared as the child who he is in the bottom of his conceptual heart.

"Jump," she repeats, moved. "Go for it without further ado, Mélovin… What we made will help you, intimacy will relax you. Trust me: I know about this, I know more than you think."

They separate, and Alva asks him to tell Jandiara to see her in their room. Kostyantyn carries the message with him and returns to the crowd surrounding the improvised stage where that exotic female _shadow_ sings in beautiful Albanian.

Nikita looks at her hypnotized, in a trance, moving his head from side to side, in the slow, erotic, intimate rhythm that the beautiful voice proposes. With a slight frown, Kostyantyn knows that he's feeling it in fullness. Interrupting him, for a moment, seems disrespectful, so he looks for Jandiara first.

He tells her what Alva has asked him to say, and Jandiara covers her mouth laughing with notorious mischief. Kostyantyn frowns, annoyed; Jandiara takes his hand with some urgency.

_»It seems that all of us will have a good night._

_»D-Don’t tell me those things…_

_»Oh! Do you know why we clash so much, spoiled child? Because we are very similar: I have my story too, my pain, my losses, the family that I had to leave behind. The 70s were sad times in Brazil, in all of South America… For think differently, I had to go, until I met Mother in Portugal and she offered me the gift to continue fighting, to not give up. But it was difficult to me, as much as it's difficult to you._

_»What was so difficult…?_

_»To open my heart, to admit my own pain, to accept help to heal. Only Alva could do it, that's why, and for thousands of things, she means everything to me. Bella is like Alva, he has the same abilities and the same innate tenderness in his heart. Don't underestimate him; jump._

Kostyantyn stares at her: it's the most intimate and wonderful thing that Jandiara has ever told him. It's no coincidence that both have used the same expression.

 _Jump_.

But how difficult it's to do it, damn it, to go back there, to return to the origin.

To see again all he has kept locked for thirty-two years.

_»Bella…_

They laugh, the first honest laugh they share in all the time they have known each other; the intertwined hands tremble at the same time, because the laughs only express one thing.

The same difficulty, traced. The similarity that they feel, the one that has made them clash so much.

Nikita looks at them: finding them laughing together after having noticed an uncomfortable tension between them in more than one occasion gives him an indescribable joy. He has noticed how closed Kostyantyn is; feeling that something seems to change means too much.

Jandiara leaves; Kostyantyn exchanges a look with Artem, and it's like with Alva some songs ago: they seem to say something to each other with telepathy.

What…?

"Niki, sorry to interrupt you, but… Can you come with me?" Kostyantyn asks.

Nervousness and fear are still present in the eyes that Nikita loves the most, and are interspersed with an almost intolerable anxiety, but also with conviction.

Nikita applauds the golden woman at the end of a new song. After doing so, he takes the hand that Kostyantyn offers him. A few steps away, and Nikita cannot avoid turning around: Artem smiles at him with a charm that makes him thrill. He doesn't understand why, it's like everyone knows something he doesn't know, but something in Artem gives him a kind of conviction too.

He will take care of that purity.

Together, Nikita and Kostyantyn walk down the corridor between the same old lights, which change from one colour to another in soft, intimate tones. One by one, all the doors are left behind.

They are close.

Kostyantyn releases his hand and hugs him by the shoulder; Nikita notices that Kostyantyn's hand trembles.

He looks at him while he walks; Kostyantyn, with his eyes no longer unequal (when did he remove the lens, when he left with Alva?), ignores him.

And the hand trembles.

And Nikita does it, too.

They reach the room and Kostyantyn lets him go first. When he enters, Nikita advances to the middle of the room: he sees a very weak light coming from the bathroom, accompanied by a subtle steam. He doesn't think about what it is: he listens, with astonishing clarity, how Kostyantyn locks the main door.

The tremor ends up taking over his body. Listening to the golden woman from afar, he turns slowly towards Kostyantyn, between the dim lights that mutate between the steam; between the imaginary fog that, by the secrets, continues to cloud their sights.

Kostyantyn is leaning against the door, one hand on either side of his body.

"I must…" he whispers. Swallows, and he continues after a pause that, in such an intimate context, it feels eternal. "I must give you your last lesson, Niki…"

Nikita's hands, tense, fall at once. He feels how his skin bristles; he does it with a violence that manages to make him feel dizzy for a moment.

The last lesson.

To love as a _shadow_.

He opens his eyes as much as he can, trembles, mumbles.

He says it:

"It's… It's not necessary, not if you are this nervous…"

Because Nikita needs something before that union, the physical.

He needs the truth.

He needs to know why Kostyantyn is hiding that amount of information from him. He needs to know that first.

To solve the riddle that Kostyantyn means.

"I'm not so nervous about that, I think…" Kostyantyn admits, suddenly shy, more child than ever. "I'm more nervous about… the above."

"Huh?"

Kostyantyn takes a deep breath. He leaves the door, and moves towards him, and faces him with eyes that, under the blue lights, see its colour enhanced. Nikita cannot imagine what is happening; Kostyantyn feels that this is the most important moment of his life.

Of the two.

Of all the lives he will ever live.

“Take a bath with me."

Nikita leans back; the light, dancing to the slow rhythm of the exotic music, goes from blue to green, from green to yellow. He looks at the steam, notices the golden lights that seem to tremble inside the bathroom, trembling as they are doing so.

Confused, he looks for Kostyantyn's eyes.

Stress, fear, nervousness, anxiety, conviction. All that is still there, but towards the end of his energy, against the wall of ice that he hasn't yet managed to pierce, Nikita notices something else, the most intense thing.

Purity.

He perceives it as if it were more than a characteristic. It's as if it existed, as if it were tangible. As if it was looking at him and pleading.

Something in Kostyantyn is no more repressed; the wall has a crack.

That means…?

Determined by suspecting his intentions, understanding that Kostyantyn needs this moment to be special for reasons that are surely transcendent, Nikita gets close to the bathroom and sees the beauty of what Kostyantyn has arranged for both: the marble bathtub is full of hot water and some candles surround it, enough for the ambience to look intimate and welcoming.

It's the sweetest thing anyone has ever prepared for him.

"Wait for me inside, I'll be with you in a moment," Nikita says with a smile that shows the extreme emotion that he has.

He has no idea what Kostyantyn intends with this scenario, why he chose this and not another, but he knows something: it's not about anything.

This is important for him and no, it has nothing to do with the final lesson.

It's something else.

It's what, thanks to the crack in the wall, he begins to perceive.

Kostyantyn nods, grateful, and enters the bathroom but not before closing the door. Inside, he covers his face with his hands.

Can he?

Can he tell him the truth?

Can he tell him about the pain he has been hiding for thirty-two years, behind a thousand keys? That pain whose reason he has tried so much, in vain, to forget.

He tries to get off his clothes with notorious difficulty; he doesn't stop trembling. Alva suggested something intimate, an ambience that allowed him to concentrate on Nikita and himself, on what he needs to unlock from his memory. Choosing water hasn't been accidental, choosing physical nudity either. They are, for him, mere symbolisms.

It's about his own feelings.

Finally, he takes off his clothes and sinks into the water on the right side watching from the door. He hugs his knees to stop the tremor, but nothing works. He's not ready, damn; he knows he will never be, and that's why he must do it now.

He has to stop looking back. It's Nikita who is ahead; it's worth to try.

However, he clenches his teeth when holding back the crying: he's an imbecile, how little he deserves Nikita.

But with what impetus he wants to deserve him.

With what despair he yearns for it.

On the other side of the door, Nikita takes off his clothes with difficulty, because he trembles too, but he also does it with a calmness that even surprises him. Kostyantyn has proposed something that implies nudity, one shared for the first time, as they have barely seen each other's body. The idea could have disturbed him in the past; now, it pushes him with a force that it's known, because he wants to see him, and touch him, and feel him.

Feel him, complete.

" _Workin’ from seven to eleven every night_ …" he hums.

He's happy to be a _shadow_ ; to see himself on this side of life begins to infect him with another kind of self-confidence, enough to undress his body with a conceptual heart that is insane. He covers himself with a clean towel from the navel down, he looks at himself, he feels burning in a different way.

Maybe he's not ready, but he needs to solve the riddle as soon as possible. Because he will not allow Carmilla to…!

He knocks the door with a shy, insecure hand; Kostyantyn tells him to pass with a trembling voice.

He opens the door, closes it, leans against the door as Kostyantyn did when they reached the room.

He raises his eyes with the difficulty of someone carrying a weight too immense on his shoulders: covered by water, between steam and golden lights, Kostyantyn looks at him like someone who looks at something perfect.

Him?

Nikita looks down with obvious shame. Kostyantyn trembles even more, but smiles. He thinks about saying something, but there's not much to say, not before the image that he contemplates, before the manifest perfection of that body that is delicate, ethereal, like that of a true angel. The legs, the thighs, the arms, the chest. Damn! Nikita continues to look down while Kostyantyn, in the distance, marvels at every detail, with parts of his body that he has never looked in that way to anyone. Because there’s a detail in each piece of skin, a harmony, a charm…

As if he were a painting hanging on a wall and each brush-stroke had its own meaning; a canvas painted by a true artist.

He remembers Stendhal and his famous syndrome: he feels overwhelmed by Nikita's beauty, because it doesn't come from the mere aesthetic ideal that represents from his perspective.

His beauty is art.

What he experiences when looking at him, he understands, is an enjoyment of an artistic nature. He's Stendhal before a work of art: vertigo, confusion, suffocation, dizziness.

Nikita's beauty is something he can barely tolerate. Being _shadow_ doesn't reach him: he's still mortal, he is before what blinds him.

The definitive beauty, which gives rise to the concept.

The concept, raw.

Nikita's hand, which holds the towel that partially covers him, it trembles like when Nikita sings; it's adorable. With the need to take care of him, Kostyantyn crosses his arms on the edge of the bathtub when turning towards him.

"Come, don't be afraid," he whispers; to speak loudly, in the midst of such intimacy, it seems like a waste of voice, but how much he needs to scream, to die, to win! “I promise you that there’s a reason for all of this."

Nikita raises his eyes; Kostyantyn feels overwhelmed once again. Although it's still difficult to him for the impact, reinforces the smile with which he hopes to calm him down.

Nikita squeezes his eyelids, squeezes the towel with his hand and moves slowly. Kostyantyn feels faint for the simple act of contemplating him: the body trembles when it moves, but even his movements seem drawn by the best brush-stroke. He's oil on canvas, and he crawls down the stretch, spreading through space.

When Nikita stops at the other extreme of the bathtub, Kostyantyn notices how he hesitates once, twice, three times.

And Nikita stares at him.

And the towel leaves him, and the perfection of the whole body without clothes puts Kostyantyn in a kind of hallucination.

He swears to see him hanging from a wall with a frame surrounding him, with wings on his back, humiliating the sun with his magnificent brilliance. Shining more than the sun, his wings shining in the heights!

That's how perfect he feels him, as if he had been blind before this moment.

He never realizes that Nikita is no longer standing next to the bathtub, but inside, covered by water and hugging his own legs.

Astonished at having lost contact with reality due to the intense moment of fascination he has just experienced, Kostyantyn returns to the previous position. Sitting identically, they look at each other under the dim lights.

They have never felt more alone than now, alone together, both of them far away the entire universe.

It's the perfect intimacy.

"Kostya…" Nikita whispers; his face, which reveals absolute confusion, and fear, and love above all, is like a poem. "Why…?"

Kostyantyn asks Mélovin for help: he has never needed him as much as he does now. Under the water, moves his hands to unleash at least a little of all nervousness that fills him.

In vain.

"This is important to me," he says. "I wanted it to be special, special to both of us, and Alva advised me to do this. I wanted… I wanted that…"

Nikita smiles. His gesture, although dazzled, seems to contain an emotion as overwhelming as his beauty is.

"It’s beautiful…" he says to him.

"You are. No…" Kostyantyn laughs against his knees; Nikita sees a child, sees it clearer than ever. "Niki, I can't believe that you are so beautiful… I-It hurts!"

Nikita sighs. He lowers his gaze, that gesture when he is sorry, and he bites his lip.

"Same…"

Kostyantyn laughs.

"You haven't seen me yet."

"I don't need to see you without clothes to know that I'm not wrong." Nikita, not without shyness, smiles at him once more. He’s moved to a point that Kostyantyn has never noticed. "And why we are here?”

Kostyantyn sees his own skin bristling. He feels himself inside a song, going through that magical point in which feelings are exalted until they sink into each listening's heart. He cannot delay this situation any longer.

Impetuous, driven by the yearning for the most heavenly beauty that he has had the opportunity to contemplate, Kostyantyn nods. Nikita doesn't understand why he does it.

"I don't know how to do it well, I've never done it. Niki…" Kostyantyn admits between nervous laughter, with any charisma covering his innocence. His eyes open when he discovers how good it feels to say it. "But I want to do it…"

Nikita frowns. He's sure that Kostyantyn doesn't talk about sex, even though everything indicates that this is the topic; what is expected in such a scene, of two bodies sharing the same nakedness. But no: it's still something else.

"What do you want to do?”

Kostyantyn reaches the maximum point of nervousness, that where emotions have no way of stopping by the overload they produce. It's like when he sings, like when he plays the piano.

The most important moment of his life, this is it.

"What I have forbidden you to do since you are a _shadow_ …” Nervous laughter leaves him; in his eyes, there's only emotion. "What I have to do to deserve you.”

He gets closer to Nikita slowly, carefully, with respect. He opens his legs and extends his hands to him, who looks at him with surprise. One movement is enough: one chest hits the other when Nikita's legs surround his hip.

"I need you to feel me…” Kostyantyn whispers with a broken voice.

Nikita releases a sound without any sense to take the air that, although not needed, so much seemed to urge him. There's no time to think that he perceives his body, that they touch each other even in the most intimate; the focus is on Kostyantyn's eyes, who looks at him with a fixity that plunges him into the sweetest uncertainty.

Because Kostyantyn speaks about the eyes, not about the body.

Are the eyes the ones that Nikita must feel.

Kostyantyn hugs him by the shoulders; Nikita puts his hands on his back. The forefronts stick together and the eyes, which don't flicker, open even more.

One second, and Nikita perceives him with his talent for the first time.

Kostyantyn has undressed his energy. Not completely, because he notices the untidiness with which he has done it in the exaggerated, nervous fluctuation, but enough.

He can do the rest.

"Are you sure…?" he asks almost without voice, stunned to feel how Kostyantyn's energy begins to fill him by the simple act of looking into his eyes.

Kostyantyn cries. However, he also smiles.

"Yes…"

The blue eyes tremble before Nikita, they tremble until they blur their pupils by the trembling, they tremble until they blur the reality, until they changing it, until they turning it into the deepest ocean, one that is clear, at first, but that, when his body sinks and crosses the wall of ice, it mutates.

There is nothing but darkness.

Nikita tries to breathe, swim, let go; he cannot; the ocean absorbs him. It sinks him like the heaviest metal in the middle of the ocean, in the deep water that he soon recognizes.

They are Kostyantyn's eyes.

Kostyantyn's deep water, expressed in his eyes, are the epicentre of his conceptual heart.

And he thought he got there before…!

And no.

Faced with the perverse majesty of this dark ocean, he understands that no one has been there.

Never.

He sinks more; he hears cries that he's not able to recognize either as his own or as those of Kostyantyn, while the golden woman continues to passionately sing her song in an endless loop. It’s the return to the most elementary feeling.

Towards the concept that constitutes Kostyantyn himself.

When the darkness of the ocean covers him completely and he cannot see anything, when it chokes him with a huge pain, Nikita uses his energy to investigate the space. He opens his eyes when all sounds stop.

He sees:

A house, he's in a simple house located in another time and another context.

Odessa, when Ukraine was still a part of the Soviet Union.

Look downs, his eyes turned into someone else's: his hands are those of a child, those of Kostyantyn when he was a child. There's an aroma that makes him think about food, a delicious one, and there's joy in the ambience while a woman sings songs with an out of tune voice.

He's at home.

A dog licks his hand under the table, a dog with lustrous black fur whose race he cannot distinguish, not now, overwhelmed by the powerful feelings that strangle him. He smiles at the dog, but he doesn't feel his smile.

Sadness fills him.

Kostyantyn is sad despite the joy that floats, despite the out-of-tune songs, the loving pet and the delicious aroma.

"Kostya, does something happen at school?“ asks the female voice.

Kostyantyn doesn't turn towards it.

"No, _mama_ , everything's fine."

 _Mama_? Nikita, looking at the child's hands, doesn't take long to understand: she's Kostyantyn's human mother.

"Sure, son? You can trust us," adds a male voice.

"Sure, _papa_ , I'm fine…"

His human parents, yes.

The child stands up with his back to them; the hands mutate, they become teenagers while Kostyantyn walks from the kitchen to the hall. What doesn't change is sadness: it's still there, latent.

It's bigger than ever.

The hands caress the keys of a piano located in the living room; they tremble just as sadness demands. Behind Kostyantyn, the previous voices repeat the questions:

"Kostya, does something happen at school?"

"No, _mama_ , everything's fine."

"Sure, son? You can trust us."

"Sure, _papa_ , I'm fine…"

No, he's not.

He runs, and the hands mature a little more.

No, he's not!

Hands close the door of a room; Kostyantyn falls on the bed, hugs the pillow, cries. In his mind, years of bullying stun him, taunts, accusations, voices of children who mutate with him. Until the crying covers everything and a new darkness surrounds him.

“I’m not!”

He blinks.

Piano keys, again; fingers playing a sad melody, as sad as the feeling that fills the heart of who's playing, the despair of feeling trapped in an endless nightmare. To feel how, because of the need to disappear, to disappear so that the bullying will disappears too, he sinks in himself into a point of no return.

The deep water, hiding Kostyantyn's purity in its darkness.

Forever.

The deep water hiding what so many taunts have made him believe.

He's not worth enough.

He doesn't deserve anything.

He _is_ nothing.

Nikita listens some cries: is he? Is Kostyantyn in the memory? Is Kostyantyn right now? Maybe, all the answers are correct, all the cries sounding to the rhythm of the sad piano that teenage fingers play in the middle of an auditorium, that of the school, a piano that isn’t capable, not even for the sadness that it expresses, to silence the laughs of those who mock the purity of a heart with so much malice.

A too dark feeling overwhelms him before the keys: it's just that, purity! The purity of a boy who has no guilt for being different, and that sinks in himself in order to protect himself, to hide himself, to disappear.

To surrender before loneliness, the only thing that someone so inferior deserves.

He raises his eyes: a prize on the piano; the auditorium, full. First place in a school competition, he's the best pianist of his age.

He smiles: his piano is the one that originates the applause that is capable of disappear the taunts.

But he cannot smile forever: Kostyantyn cries against the keys. Behind him, the questions are repeated.

Something happens? No. Are you sure? Yes.

What are these applauses worth, if to win them he has stopped being him! Him, the one who sank in the deepest part of his heart, the one that lies trapped in the deep water of the heart that isn't merely conceptual yet.

Nikita listens how Kostyantyn's heart, who by the trance recognizes as his own, breaks in two. Literally, it breaks, it separates, it shatters. One part destroys another, the one who receives the applause destroys the one who receives the insults.

He blinks again: in front of the mirror before him, Kostyantyn is no more than sixteen.

"It's your fault," he says to the mirror, crying, and the heart, inside the chest, breaks even more.

Then, a paper full of names. With a pen, he highlights one.

Mélovin.

In the mirror, a smile is drawn on the lips.

"Mélovin," he says loudly.

The questions, meanwhile, continue.

"Kostya, if you need to talk…"

He never turns around; the questions are repeated to infinity in the midst of the joyful ambiance of that house lost somewhere in Odessa.

Tears cloud his sight.

"Are you okay, son?”

He's not.

The auditorium, a different one, that of another school, is empty; sadness remains the same no matter how much he tries. Kostyantyn sings a very old song that Nikita recognizes as one of the many hits that Sofia Rotaru has. And what a sad coincidence!

He’s alone, he feels lonely; Nikita has already perceived this, but now he does it more, with a violence traced to how he used to feel it.

It's the same kind of loneliness.

Tears scream in the back of his mind; are those of this moment, are those that they share, in unison, out of trance. Fog surrounds the piano, while trembling hands play sadness.

Kostyantyn has fulfilled his mission: alone, he has disappeared himself. Nobody sees him anymore.

At the bottom of the water, the purity that represents his essence trembles, cries, screams.

Shouts!

But nobody sees him.

But he never turns around.

However, someone appears next to him.

An angel.

"You're fantastic…"

"T-Thank you…"

"Play another one!"

Kostyantyn does it. He plays another Sofia's song, as popular in those years as the legend she currently is, and the angel sings along with him.

The voice illuminates the audience.

It illuminates the epicentre of the deep water, where purity stops crying for a moment, for the first time in years.

"Kristian Kostov, nice to meet you, I'm new here, I came from Bulgaria."

"K-Kostyantyn Bocharov…"

Kristian's eyes stare at him, erase the world, everything disappears, except him; while, the questions continue repeating _ad infinitum_.

"Are you okay, Kostya…?"

"Yes, _mama_."

Looking at Kristian's eyes, not without panicking at the discovery, Kostyantyn discovers that, for the first time, he doesn't lie.

He's okay.

"That friend of yours…?"

"That is, _mama_ : he's a friend."

And he's not.

In a bar, sitting before to each other at a table, hands rub against each other in a movement that it's not accidental.

For the first time in his life, feeling Kristian's skin brush against him, he's fine.

"But it's not fine…" Kostyantyn whispers in the dark.

Some hands caress his face. Deep in the ocean, the water shakes.

"It's love, and love is never wrong, Kostya…"

Kostyantyn's hands also caress; Nikita feels how his hands tremble, how they venture through the skin that doesn't belong to them with explicit shyness.

"We have listened to each other in the fog, Kostya… We have listened to each other and we'll never be alone again!” Kristian says, the real Kristian, crying.

Lips travel through a body while other lips slide over the skin; Nikita feels how Kostyantyn's happiness overwhelms him, how purity grows, explodes, and the water turn as blue as when the sun is over the ocean.

As blue as Kostyantyn's eyes, how they deserve to look always.

This is happiness.

Kristian's eyes are full of human tears, sideways. The intimacy of the meeting is as beautiful as it is unbearable.

Pleasure and love are the perfect fusion.

"I love you…" Kristian says.

And the questions continue.

"Son…"

"Kostya…"

"Are you okay?”

Kostyantyn smiles at the mirror. He's still embarrassed, he cannot admit it for more than he's sure they suspect, but he smiles.

"I am."

And he loves Kristian too. Although many say it’s wrong, even if it was so badly seen at that time, in that place.

He loves him.

But Kristian's skin gets cold under Kostyantyn's fingers as the bodies come together for the last time, celebrating his twenty-first birthday.

The skin freezes him.

His voice condemns him.

His heart, the own one, the one that it has protected so much the purity in the deep water, betrays him:

"We’ll be free, Kostya! We'll be free and we'll be together forever…! Don't you want that?! Don't you want to be with me?!”

"Y-Yes!"

"Then ask me, please! I need it!"

"But…"

"I don't want to lose you, Kostya!"

Love responds without hesitation, a body joined to the other in the middle of the act that nothing but purity should symbolize in the eyes of that Kostyantyn trapped in the deep water, the fragile, the different.

The one who wasn't guilty.

"Kill me…!"

And the fangs stuck in his neck while weeping sounds in memories and in the present.

And Kostyantyn's eyes, the human eyes, it close forever.

"He's not an angel," Nikita listens, it's a woman.

It's her, Carmilla.

"But…!"

"You must kill him; his existence is a mistake!“

"No…!"

"You must kill him, my child! Now, you have me, don't cry like that… You have me, you don't need this mistake!"

Mistake?

The water gets darker.

Mistake.

Kostyantyn's eyes open for a simple moment: he sees Carmilla, he sees Kristian, but the weakness is so much that he doesn't understand anything of what he sees or what he hears.

The eyes close again.

He's a mistake, and knowing it burns his heart.

When he opens his eyes once again, he's out in the open, under the most diffuse stars. Kristian carries him in his arms.

Everything is a mistake.

"It doesn't matter, we'll escape! No one will find us! I’ll not let anyone kill you!”

"I want to go home, Kris…" Kostyantyn pleads.

"You can't, my love, you are a _shadow_ now, and to be a _shadow_ implies to left behind your human life."

The heart, rebuilt by love, doesn't break; it’s pulverized.

Purity vanishes in the depths of darkness.

"What…?"

"Of course! We don't need them anymore, we don't need our parents forbidding our relationship! We don't need anything else!"

"But…"

Two men appear before them. They are covered by old hoods.

"Kristian, this is unforgivable…" it says one in Russian. His accent sounds Italian.

"I can't kill him!"

"Kristian, give us the boy…" it says the other. Speaks Russian with more Italian accent than the other man.

"I can't lose him! I don't want to!"

But Kostyantyn doesn't listen to anything, really. Just thinks about one thing, one in the middle of that strange scenario, on the edge of the beaches of Odessa, sunk in the most perpetual darkness.

"Why I didn't turn around…?" he says when he cries.

Tears extend; they travel from the past to the present.

"Why…?"

"NO!" Kristian screams.

Arms pull him. Kristian screams too much, meanwhile.

"Don't take him from me! NO! KOSTYA!"

The arms release Kostyantyn. The water surrounds him.

He listens to the voices with an Italian accent:

"We should burn him."

"It's not necessary: the sun will kill him as soon as it dawns."

Kristian's voice is heard farther and farther away; Kostyantyn sinks as when he was a child, sinks into the depths of the Black Sea as he once sank into his own heart to disappear from the world.

But some arms, other ones, pull him. Dizzy, Kostyantyn sees the stars as diffuse as before, but in the arms of a stranger.

"Easy, boy…" Artem whispers, as wet as he is, as cold and white as he is.

In the sand, meanwhile, Mother has Citrus on her shoulders. The two men pull Kristian; they seem pushed by a huge force of unknown origin. Is Mother?

Citrus meows, furious.

Is Mother or…?

"BASTARDS!" Mother yells. "I'm going to find you sooner or later! I'LL TEAR YOU APART!"

Nikita doesn't understand: why Mother doesn't do anything? The answer comes from Kostyantyn's heart: because it was to fight or to save him, because the dawn was near.

It was a life or death case, literal. They were going to survive the sun long enough to protect themselves, but he wouldn't.

Mother and Artem hug him on the sand, later. They give him blood from their wrists, they lull him like a child. Far away, Kristian still screams.

"THEY ARE LYING!"

Until his screams are no longer heard.

But Kostyantyn doesn't care about anything; he’s dead in life.

He had given his body and soul to a being that had taken that from him, life.

"Why I didn't turn around…?" he asks in Mother's arms, crying.

And he blinks. And he appears before the house in the suburbs of Odessa. Artem has him in his arms; he's still weak.

His parents, the humans, cry at the door surrounded by patrols. It's the last time he sees them before surrendering to the shadows.

Why he didn't turn around? So many years ignoring their questions, so many years looking in others what only they could give him.

Unconditional love.

So many years giving back to them to discover, when he loses them, how much he needed and will need them.

So many years ashamed to look at them, because he didn’t deserve the love they gave him, to destroy their lives like that.

But Mother and Artem embrace him. As he shouts his hatred and his desire to die, they embrace him.

"Don't give up, son…" Mother asks him through tears.

"We are here for you, we'll always be here for you…" Artem swears.

Darkness arrives and nothing disturbs it. Before the scene, Nikita feels how hate decreases day by day, month by month, year by year.

Not so the sadness of having ruined the only two lives that should have mattered to Kostyantyn.

Because who deserved the pain was him, not them.

He opens his eyes, and Kostyantyn appears in the mirror with his hair tinged with platinum blond. In his left eye, there is a white contact lens.

"Mélovin…" he whispers when a smile is drawn on his lips.

A piano is heard, an audience of hundreds sings some lyrics. He's no longer Kostya, because Kostya died that night in the depths of the Black Sea. He's Mélovin, the _shadow_ , the survivor who no longer feels, and who sings with the vital energy that takes without permission from his conceptual heart, the one where Kostya lies sunk, dead in life.

" _Never give up! Never give up! Oh! Oh!_ "

Mother and Artem congratulate him. When they leave, before the mirror and with blue eyes again, Kostyantyn cries.

"Why I didn't turn around…?!"

The one who deserved the eternal suffering was him.

The one who deserves it _is_ him.

Moments of madness, desires to die, to disappear, to do everything when possible, less to kill just as the monster that had killed him had done; calendars moving at the speed of light. Only on stage he stops his cries. Although he's doing well, despite having Mother and Artem, no. He never stops crying.

The suffering was only for him.

The circle is completed: he will never be able to change. Never, as long as the purity of his essence remains trapped in the deep water of his heart.

Dead, without giving him the chance to resurrect.

And the question is repeated before the mirror. Sometimes with white hair, sometimes with red hair, sometimes with black hair, like now.

"Why I didn't turn around…?”

In the deep water, purity is shrouded in darkness, dead, because Kostya is that purity. Until the sun comes up suddenly, from one day to the other, when Mélovin least expected it.

Thanks to a voice that Nikita recognizes as his own.

He sees himself: from Kostyantyn's eyes, he sees himself on the stage singing 'I poletim'. The light that comes from him blinds him.

He blinds them both.

Kostya is alive, he is before who sings on stage; the sun reaches the depths of the concept without difficulties, with magic.

Nikita's voice is the only one that has been in the deep water before, in the deepest, even without knowing it. 

Yes, it has been there, hugging him.

They blink feeling the same being thanks to the trance they share. They unfold when returning to the bathtub: their faces are red, and their necks, and, in the water, red drops float.

Nikita looks at the blood in Kostyantyn's eyes. Desperate, he hugs him with his arms and legs. The water is warm, the candles still burn, and the words, all, seem useless.

Everything is useless, everything, when Kostyantyn cries on his shoulder. Tears of blood fall down Nikita's back and they produce him a chill that Kostyantyn tries to heal by covering him with his arms.

Kostyantyn tries to say something, as if any explanation was necessary; Nikita silences him by tightening him. What little does it matter all to him, to feel their bodies so close in the most explicit, to become aware of the nakedness they share. Everything is superficial, as useless as words.

Nothing that they perceive with their bodies has to do with the transcendental feeling that, due to the trance, will belong to both of them forever.

Kostyantyn will not burden alone with that pain again. He never will.

Nikita looks at the wall with an overwhelming fixity: Kostyantyn has always had guilt inside his heart. He blames himself for letting himself be carried away by the feelings he felt for Kristian, for having harmed his human parents in the worst way, for having understood too late what he lost by accepting to be the same as Kristian in pursuit of the eternity of their bond. And the guilt was born of insecurity, of that repetition and repetition of taunts and insults that he had ended believing in the most important moment of life, childhood, where the scars burn the most. Everything was about discrimination, about being different.

About disappearing himself in the deep water to fit.

Nikita wants to tell him so many things, to tell him that he understands the origin of his sadness, that he feels sorry for everything of what has happened to him, that he feels his pain as if it belonged to him, but nothing will be enough.

There is only one thing he can say:

"Never say again that you don't deserve me: you do it more than ever."

"But…"

"You deserve me, and I hope to deserve you too."

Kostyantyn smiles between tears: undress his energy is something he never wanted to do with anyone. He has evaded it not for believing more than others, to see in others objects of distrust as he sometimes pretends in order to protect himself; it was because he believed he was less than everyone.

For fearing to ruin Mélovin projecting Kostya into others.

He didn't manage to show everything; his intention was to explain to Nikita how important he was for him, to make him understand how he had awakened Kostya, so asleep for so long in the depths of the water. He didn't show everything, but Nikita's hug it feels as if it wouldn't have been necessary.

Kostyantyn releases Nikita. Unable to stop crying, cleans his face, hid back, Nikita's shoulder, removes blood with water. Nikita looks at him shocked just before imitating him.

With their bodies so close, they cleanse the blood that emotion has made appear. In the end, there are the two of them, two bodies in the middle of the bathtub, two pairs of eyes staring at each other.

There is everything that matters, the essence.

"We are what we have lived," Nikita says in a whisper, smiling. "We can learn always from what we have lived and seek to be better every day.”

Kostyantyn realizes that Nikita's eyes have changed: they look strong, determined, too different from when he barely knew him.

The will to live it feels, in his eyes, stronger than anything else, and it’s intermingled in a beautiful set with the most visceral love.

There is no surrender; there is hope, and desire, and plans, and dreams.

There is too much, and much of what Nikita feels involves him.

It has him on the same stage, at his side.

It has his voice in the deep water, embracing him forever.

Kostyantyn touches Nikita's face with his fingers, looking at him with evident fascination: what special being he has crossed in the way, in what unexpected way he has awakened him.

How much he helped him to learn that there is nothing wrong with being the one who he had hidden so well in himself, Kostya, the child, the human.

He takes his mouth to Nikita's, brushes it, kisses it. Slowly, just touching his lips, he loses himself. He feels how, in his heart, Kostya swims and swims, how he fights against a thousand waves before going out. Confessing his pain hasn't cured him, because the guilt for not having turned around and for having hurt them is excessive, but it will help to do so someday.

Hopefully, it will.

He hugs Nikita. He kisses him with the same slowness, but with more depth. Entire minutes pass, maybe more than an hour; calm reigns in the two hearts thanks to the shared affection. Nikita, meanwhile, thinks of the sad circumstance in which Kostyantyn had been turned into a _shadow_ : during an intimate moment of sublime exaltation. Now everything makes sense, that's why Kostyantyn has had so much trouble in getting carried away with him.

He wants to take care of him and wants to be cared for too.

"Niki…" Kostyantyn says between slow, sweet kisses, although they feel as intimate as the place on which they are and as the emotion they reflect on the other as a kind of mirror.

"What…?" Nikita asks, in a trance because of the heat he perceives in Kostyantyn's energy, and the heat he perceives in his own energy, and the overdose that this happiness means to both.

"Come to bed with me, please…"

Nikita just hugs him one more time. The energy, inside and outside of him, is made of an identical fire.

This time it will be different, he promises to himself.

He will not allow Kostyantyn to hide that purity in his heart again.

Nevermore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading. Thank you so much. This chapter is longer enough; I will not write a long final note.
> 
> I just want to thank the amazing inspiration that Jonida Maliqi gave me to write this chapter: she hypnotized me with her voice on 'Ktheju tokës'. And Rona Nishliu too: 'Suus' was with me in the final part of the chapter, making me cry while I was writing that scene. This is an Albanian chapter, in some way. Thanks to that amazing women for inspiring me with their talent and feelings.
> 
> Raddie, thank you for the feedback. I will never be able to thank you enough: it means everything to me. This chapter is for you, if you want to accept it as a present. It's for you because you give me strength every time, you encourage me to write with your kindness and I'm grateful. Thank you... :')
> 
> And thanks Memi and Di for the advices. I was insecure about a lot of things and you helped me a lot! And gracias to Blake because she read this some days ago and her feedback helped me to be brave and end my translation. I was so scared... 
> 
> Thank you, guys!!! See you soon. ♥


	19. XVIII

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tonight, love needs to be expressed in its own language.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for my English, please. And I highly recommend to read all the tags first. 
> 
> Thank you so much. ♥

The eyes look at the eyes; reality mutates, it becomes something as simple as that, as two pairs of pupils encapsulating two universes.

Forming other one.

Blooming in the same for the simple act of contemplation.

In the real nudity.

That of the alchemy of souls.

The birth of the combined soul, fused, linked.

Love, the third soul.

Love, the harmonies of two voices rediscovering each other in the mutual exaltation.

Love, that rose that blooms from the very entrails of death thanks to four conceptual arms squeezing in the centre of the dying heart.

That heart.

That one that beats right now.

Right now, right here.

 

**.**

**.**

**.**

**XVIII**

Beauty is mysterious, it is when we think we have seen it, when we think we know how and where to find it, only to find out that this is not true, that beauty never stops being discovered, being learned, being admired by the eyes that know how to recognize it.

A few months ago, he would never have imagined himself in this situation, naked before another man; he would never have imagined this way, as he is now, looking at this man and discovering in the shape of his body the most blinding beauty in history. Because a lot has happened in recent months, sensations of vertigo before nothingness, dreams about moons crying blood. A death, a conceptual resurrection.

Everything has changed.

He himself has done it by breaking the wheel that kept him captive in an unhappy life.

For that reason, for having demolished the prejudices of his heart in order to discover what lay outside the wheel, he feels so happy right now, contemplating every detail of the body before him. Now, because he has opened his eyes, he has the opportunity to feel this way, happy, loved, protected; he can afford to find a different beauty, of another nature, in places where he wouldn't have been able to notice anything before.

Because he allowed himself to evolve, because he dared to get lost in the confines of the unknown, he has found this.

The beauty that obscures everything, the past, the future, just by belonging to who belongs.

To him, to both, to the bond that beats inside and outside the mirror.

"Are you looking at me?" Kostyantyn asks him. He's next to the door, drying himself without showing any shame.

He's comfortable like this, before Nikita, without clothes to cover him.

Is that, after having shown his heart through energy, there is no reason to be ashamed. After such emotional release, the physical part it feels simple, easy, maybe even mundane. That's why it was so important to show him his truth.

If he hadn't done it, he would have never deserved to share this moment with him.

Nikita smiles when he sees himself discovered: he's still in the bathtub, hugging his legs, curled up at one end, enjoying the heat that the water hasn't lost completely yet. To answer, he just lifts his shoulders containing a chuckle.

Kostyantyn laughs, and his beauty dazzles Nikita once again: he always talks about him, that he's beautiful like no other. He forgets to look in the mirror when he talks about beauty.

Kostyantyn perfect without knowing it just for being him.

Nikita observes everything Kostyantyn does without covering himself for a second with the towel he has in his hands: he approaches the mirror in front of the sink and dries his hair with some roughness. Nikita notices another thing when he contemplates him: the hair looks subtly waved when it's not combed to a side. He also notices, when he travels through him with his eyes, some moles, very well-formed muscles in his arms, how long and aesthetic his legs are, a tattoo on one of his arms.

" _Brave, love, freedom_ ," he reads from a distance.

Kostyantyn smiles at him while drying his hair before the mirror.

"Have you never seen my tattoo?"

“No," Nikita confesses with a shy smile. "I like what it says."

"Thank you…" Kostyantyn feels sad for the first time since the trance; he looks sweet. "I did it… ten years ago? I was with _mama_ in Los Angeles, nobody else came with us on that trip: after a concert we gave, she tattooed the name of one of her songs and I decided to do this…"

"Why?"

An hour ago, answering Nikita's question would have been impossible for Kostyantyn.

Now, embraced by Nikita in the deep water, things feel not only easy; they are.

"It was a way of remembering everything that _mama_ taught me when I just wanted to die…" When he says the latter, Kostyantyn looks down. He doesn't do it for sorrow; he does it by perceiving the anguish he used to feel. "She made me regain my love for music; remember that, even if I had done everything wrong, I still had it. This tattoo is that reminder; is what music means to me, what I want my music to transmit, what I want to leave to each person who listens to me." In the end, he caresses the three words and smiles at them, or he smiles at that Kostyantyn from the past, so needy to cling to things to stay alive, to not give up.

Nikita is so happy for what he hears that he doesn't know what to do with himself. Although a slight concern invades him to notice how Kostyantyn's face mutates from nostalgia to anguish.

"It will be difficult to leave _mama_ and Artem, but it's necessary."

Surprised, Nikita inquires:

"Leave them?"

Kostyantyn nods.

"It's time: I don't plan to stay in _mama_ 's entourage. I imagine visiting her whenever I can, of course, but I need something else now, Niki…"

"What do you need?"

Kostyantyn looks at him: everything in his eyes seems to disarm when he contemplates him. Somehow, they feel the same.

"Ukraine and you…"

Nikita smiles tenderly; he understands so much the importance of what Kostyantyn tells him that he cannot help but disarm before him too.

Although with some shyness, he says the first thing he feels about the idea:

"We can live in my apartment if you want, or look for something bigger, or…"

"Do you know Odessa?"

Nikita nods, serious, without knowing if Kostyantyn really wants to talk about his old home.

"I went there some time ago. Only a few days. The beach was beautiful, I always wanted… live near a beach, the water, and…" He doubts at the end. Is it a good idea to say something like that or…?

Kostyantyn surprises him:

"We’ll live as close as possible."

Nikita feels pain in the brow when he frowns too much. He's too moved.

"I would love to…"

Kostyantyn turns his eyes to the mirror. Keeps drying his hair, which is increasingly dishevelled, wavy and bright. An instant of insecurity intercepts him when he looks at himself as he has done so many times in the past, during each fight between Mélovin and Kostya inside the reflection. Clenching his teeth behind a fake half smile, he dissipates the insecurity as quickly as he can.

It has to be perfect.

"You’ll love Odessa,” he assures Nikita; he must concentrate in him, not in arguing. "I haven't gone for thirty-two years, but…"

Then, Kostyantyn tells him things about the Odessa that he knew, the old one, and about the Odessa that, thanks to articles, books and videos, he has managed to know at a distance, the Odessa after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Nikita notices that Kostyantyn is well informed about everything that concerns his old home and Ukraine itself; he tells everything with childish enthusiasm, while drying his hair and without stopping showing himself just like his tattoo says, with bravery, with love, with freedom.

Just as he is, in essence, Kostyantyn being the _shadow_ and the human at the same time.

 _Beauty is mysterious,_ Nikita thinks once again listening to him, blinded by the one in front of him; he never imagined himself that way, naked next to another man, with his body naked, but above all with his heart. But here he is.

Happy.

Kostyantyn leaves the towel aside; he's already dry. Takes a comb looking at himself in the mirror.

"Leave your hair like that," Nikita asks in a whisper that returns them to the intimacy that they share, this one that feels so daily and easy, but is still a novelty.

Kostyantyn perceives how that words electrify him; he feels beautiful before Nikita, beautiful as he had never felt before anyone; he feels the desire that energy transmits to him, the desire mixed with love, with empathy and with so many other important, significant things. He needs him.

Now.

"Well…" he whispers in a clearly seductive way. "If you like it…"

He leaves the comb in front of the mirror, moves his dishevelled hair to one side and walks towards the bathtub. He bends down before Nikita, leans on the edge with his arms crossed. Smiles staring at him, and Nikita feels the way Kostyantyn wanted; seduction is easily read in his eyes.

“Do you need help?" Kostyantyn asks.

Too seduced, Nikita gets lost in the blue. In a way, it's as if he hadn't heard him. But he has done it, for which he responds with a funny tone, although without hiding the shame that still doesn't leave him completely:

"For what?"

Kostyantyn caresses his cheek with the back of his right hand. Nikita feels a chill.

"For go to bed with me…"

Nervousness attacks Nikita. He wants to feel the freedom that Kostyantyn exhibits before him after revealing his most intimate memories, he wants to feel it as present as during the trance, but how difficult it is.

To do what Kostyantyn has asked him before leaving the bathtub: go to bed with him, the bed where _shadows_ like them will never be able to sleep.

"Sure…" Nikita whispers when a new caress on his cheek, specifically on the mole under his eye, plunges him into a state of overwhelming reverie.

Maybe, he just needs to get carried away.

Kostyantyn extends a hand; Nikita holds it looking at his eyes. He gets up, goes out, and Kostyantyn wraps him with two towels, one around the body, the other around the head.

Nikita looks at him timidly; after the trance, Kostyantyn looks liberated, and the conviction that is in his eyes is categorical. He reminds him the bookstore, so long ago, and Kostyantyn watching him while he was singing 'I poletim' a cappella.

They empty the bathtub, leave the bathroom and close the door; before their eyes, the bed seems to call them under the lights that never stop changing their colours.

Nikita breathes the air he doesn't need; the nervousness is more than the one he anticipated when he thought about this, something that, if he has to be honest, he has done since he was human in the solitude of that little bed in his apartment, first with prejudice, then with shame, towards the end with a desire that even surprised him by its vehemence, for everything that it was able to make to his heart and his body. He doesn't have time to think too much about it, however; Kostyantyn takes him to the couch by pulling him gently by the hand, and removes the towel, and looks at him, and struggles for not to get lost in new hallucinations.

Nikita remains like this, standing next to the couch, and only when he does, he becomes aware of the subtle tremor of his own body. It's because the natural cold after leaving the water, yes, but that’s not the only reason.

He tries to hide it; he fails. Kostyantyn has noticed his nervousness, but he knows that, to relax him, he must proceed naturally, without asking too much, without overwhelming him. With that in mind, he proceeds to dry him; Nikita lets him dry him with a blank mind, looking at nothingness with his eyes wide open.

Why does he have to be so stupid?

Meanwhile, Kostyantyn gets lost in the skin, leaves his pupils free, and they travel, and travel, and they are seduced by the pallor in contrast to the changing lights. Nikita’s skin looks seductive under this red that changes to orange.

Touching.

"You have so many moles," Kostyantyn whispers; as in the bathtub, raising his voice, in such intimacy, is useless. It is in the silence that, without music playing in the headquarters, is more sepulchral than death.

Nikita nods; his breathing, while the towel dries the skin of his stomach, gets out of control when another chill attacks him.

"You too…" he whispers without a voice.

"But you have more. You have so, so many…" And Kostyantyn dies to kiss them, all, one by one. "Although this will always be my favourite," he proclaims when he kisses the mole of the right cheek.

Nikita trembles to contain a sigh.

He's lost in the nothingness, again, the nothingness of the wall that he sees, the nothingness of the orange that changes to yellow, of the yellow that changes to green, of the green that changes to blue; in the nothingness, while the towel visits every corner of his body and causes, when it touches him, a thousand more sighs, a thousand sighs that Nikita swallows by frowning more and more.

Kostyantyn stops behind his back. He dries and kisses intermittently, caresses the moles lost in the shoulder blades with his lips. He hugs him, turns him around, looks into his eyes with nothing but love filling him. He smiles, and the enjoyment that this intimacy gives them is equally monumental.

"You're… very sweet with me," Nikita whispers also smiling, something that he does almost against his will, when a lump in his throat imposes it to him.

Kostyantyn perceives the change in his energy: Nikita begins to free himself, although almost unconsciously. When the hair is the only thing that remains wet, they sit next to each other in the middle of the couch. Kostyantyn scrubs his hair; Nikita has nothing before his eyes.

Only the bed.

"Do you like me to be sweet with you?” Kostyantyn asks. He's very nervous too, but the conviction helps him: he knows that Nikita needs him strong given his inexperience, and that helps him to maintain the seriousness, the commitment.

Nikita, always trembling, nods.

They are a mirror: they are equally moved, as well as hypnotized, by this kind of magic that flows so well between them, one that seems inexplicable, but that is perceived, through energy, as the most real thing that exists, even more real than themselves, as if it gets originated elsewhere, in another being.

Magic wraps them; decorates Kostyantyn's sweetness and the enjoyment that Nikita allows himself to feel despite his tremors, that don't stop before the unknown. He feels good, as if he floated thanks to the lack of weight on his shoulders, as if he were flying around the room without more fear, only with joy.

As it always should be.

The towel that covers his head stops, abandons him, disappears from the scene; Nikita feels his hair dry. Breathes with obvious agitation, still looking at the bed. It's obvious what's next, he knows it's difficult for Kostyantyn for that past with Kristian; he knows how much he wants to lose himself in the magic of what he feels, what he has longed for a thousand and one reasons, but it’s difficult, much more difficult than he has foreseen.

He needs Kostyantyn to help him.

But how to ask for help?

“What else do you like?” Kostyantyn asks when combing his hair, as he places his curls on one side, on the other, one by one.

Nikita is numbed by the attentions, by the excess of sweetness that twists his heart.

That's it: he needs to be pushed, to be thrown into the abyss of everything he doesn't understand.

Kostyantyn notices how Nikita looks at the bed, how he's only able to look at it; both are aware of all that this shared nudity implies after the trance. Turning a little closer to him, he looks for his closest hand, the right one. He takes his hand in his and kisses it.

The emotion that invades them when they touch is like blood, it travels through their linked veins, it fills one and then the other, it overflows the veins with a visceral need, to smile until it hurts.

It’s too beautiful. To be like this, together, allowing themselves to be who they really are in pursuit of getting to know each other in the most intimate way. And how curious that nothing more than this seems necessary to do so.

Why?

Nikita contains a thousand more sighs before answering:

"I like you…”

He tightens his lips when Kostyantyn, in response, massages his hand in his. There is an intensity, a slowness that allows him to feel in detail every tiny touch. His hand, at the mercy of Kostyantyn's hands, can do nothing, only to enjoy, to surrender to each touch as if they give him, one after the other, the energy he needs to resist.

The sensation becomes overwhelming; a tingling that shakes his body in another chill announces it. Kostyantyn's fingers, on his skin, transform him into a piano.

Only emotions, sensations, truth he manages to extract from him.

Nikita flows, rises, loses himself in the ceiling, but he crosses it. Like a ghost, he passes through it, embraces the sky, and the moon attacks him when Kostyantyn looks at him in the eyes. As in the first dream, that moon crying blood.

Now, just cries love.

“Niki…” Kostyantyn sighs as he approaches him a little closer, brushing his cheek with his lips; his hands don't release his.

Nikita takes a deep breath, overwhelmed; the caresses of the fingers reach him turned into an electric discharge that awakens his body from a long lethargy. When it expands, it's like losing control of himself for a moment. Panic invades him, he becomes aware of every drop of blood that travels through his body; the desire also invades him, transforms his skin into crystal.

Kostyantyn breaks him easily using caresses in his hand, whispers against his cheek and the invincible blue eyes on him.

It's like being in the middle of the maximum exaltation, together in the most explicit. They just need to touch each other to feel their bond to that point.

Nothing else, no.

Why?

“What?" he murmurs in a sigh, lost in the eyes.

Nikita looks down, shy, confused; Kostyantyn holds his jaw and urges him to regain eye contact. How easy to read, in the blue, the extraordinary desire joined to the most moving idealism, to fear, to nervousness, to love.

Love, yes.

Kostyantyn smiles, although he doesn't hide the nervousness he feels rising through his skin. He has imagined this for a long time. After that kiss in the bookstore, there hasn't been a dawn when, in his coffin, he didn't think about having Nikita with him in a bed. Because he doesn't believe in sex without love, he’s not interested at all in the pleasure of the body alone, without the company of the pleasure of the heart, but how inevitable it had been to imagine it so many times, Nikita with him in a bed, sighing with his eyes fixed on him, erasing every bad memory by showing him the pleasure of his body fused with the one of his heart. Reflecting each other as they are doing now, sharing the same emotion with the same transcendence.

"I…” he whispers, but he doesn't go on.

He cannot.

His imagination it hasn’t been enough for this. As with the ethereal image of Nikita’s body without clothes, Kostyantyn hasn't been able to imagine this scene with justice: he has idealized it too. In his idealism, he has imagined everything so perfect, every kiss, every caress, every movement, as if they were in a corny movie. He has imagined it one way, the other, in all possible ways. He has imagined his emotion, he has filled his heart with the emotion that the thought of being with Nikita causes him, but no.

It hasn't been enough.

The insecurity, always so present in the mirror, attacks him again: he doesn't deserve him.

Not enough.

He squeezes his hands feeling pathetic. Soon, the nervousness is so immense that he has no way of remembering the obvious: Nikita can perceive everything.

And he perceives it.

And the hand that encloses between his trembles.

How to advance? How, if both are overwhelmed by everything what it means to be like this? The magic overwhelms them, they don't understand it, they don't know how to tame it, how to deserve it. They feel the same without knowing it: they have underestimated the emotion they share; nothing does justice to all what the other inspires.

The magic is so powerful that it has no difficulty in snatching their strength.

However, no.

Nikita notices something.

“Kostya…” he says.

“What?”

They tremble; the hands infect each other with nervousness.

"We are thinking too much…”

Kostyantyn laughs to keep from cry. Not being able to believe that he deserves this scene and this man it hurts his pride. But how much he yearns to do it, to deserve him.

To give him, in bed, the perfect scene that he couldn’t give him when he turned him into a _shadow_.

"It's unavoidable,” Kostyantyn admits. He’s on the defensive, Nikita perceives it, but he is with himself. “It's like when you imagine something for too long, as if you were going to give a show to an audience. You imagine everything, your voice singing, the public’s reaction, but when you get there, to that scene dreamed of with so much love, you are speechless. Emotion overcomes you, the scene overloads you: you cannot do it.”

Because that's it, Kostyantyn thinks as he talks: it's not enough. Nothing it reaches.

This is important, too important, and he’s not up to do this.

“And you tremble, and you go out of tune, and you feel that you’ll never be enough, that you don't deserve that emotion…” Nikita adds.

Kostyantyn squeezes his hands one more time.

"And you do all what you can,” he says, "and you cannot make it as beautiful as when you imagined it. It’s for you, because it was something you had dreamed of for too long, but you don't see that satisfaction that you feel in the public.”

Nikita’s hand that Kostyantyn doesn't hold tightens on his hands. The four, together, tremble in the same way, identically to the trembling of their emotions.

“And then you discover how alone you are,” Nikita replies to Kostyantyn, "because you feel a transcendental, unique emotion that you haven't been able to transmit to anyone. Because there is no loneliness that hurts more than that one, the inability to demonstrate what you feel, that specific feeling, and make someone feel it with you.”

Nikita holds the tears; how many times he has felt that, that loneliness, that seeing how the audience vanished before his heart, in flesh and blood on stage, naked and willing, bloody for having been pulled up in vain.

That is loneliness, the true loneliness: that of feeling too much and not being able to do it together with someone, that of being locked in an impenetrable, untransmissible emotion that deserves to be shared.

That you _need_ to share.

But no.

"But we are not alone now…” Nikita murmurs.

With his eyes closed, he drops his face over Kostyantyn's. Of his skin, by the electric discharge that the caresses on his hand cause him, some instincts bloom, ones he doesn't know.

Are the instincts of the _shadow_?

Soon, in the form of a huge thirst that bristles his skin, he finds the answer.

Yes, they are those instincts.

Thirst slows him down, but he continues as he can:

"We are not alone, not now,” he insists looking Kostyantyn at the eyes with all the fixity that his pupils, dizzy by known and unknown sensations, allow him. "We are here, together… We can stop putting so much pressure on ourselves, to stop being so afraid of not being enough, and learn to… enjoy together…"

Kostyantyn opens his mouth to release a sigh: how intense is the energy that immobilizes him. He bites his lip to bear how his skin seems to dissolve by the simple fact of being in contact with Nikita's.

He’s terrified, more than he would like. But he’s grateful.

He’s fortunate to have allowed Nikita, Nikita and no one else, to sink to the depths of his feelings. Now, Nikita has one more talent in his hands, to know how to calm him when insecurity manifests in the mirror, that mirror that now belongs only to him, because he is the mirror.

Nikita himself.

With his eyes fixed on him, overwhelmed by the emotion that has bloom from the magic, Kostyantyn regains a bit of self-confidence, the enough to advance:

"And how… do you want we enjoy?" he asks with some anxiety that he's not able to disguise, with the untidy sound of his breathing covering his voice.

Electricity pierces Nikita like a stake; the question surpasses him just when he hears it. Desperate, leans his forehead against Kostyantyn's nose. He caresses it by moving his face to one side and the other, addicted to the power that the other skin has on him: to increase the electricity in a way that makes him dangerously addictive, the best drug at the best moment, the tension filling him with anxiety. Against him, Kostyantyn trembles, but struggles to resist.

"I haven't thought about that…" he responds, and his voice is also covered by the sound of his breathing.

Kostyantyn’s mouth opens a little more, shows his sharp fangs. Nikita breathes his breathing, and everything around both seems to smell like blood.

The mouth smiles showing the inhuman teeth, and it looks beautiful before Nikita's eyes. A laugh escapes through the mouth; is contagious.

To their surprise, they laugh out loud.

"How do you not know it?!" Kostyantyn asks, whose voice, still weakly, accompanies his breathing. "You have not imagined it? Are you serious?!"

They laugh more. Nikita lifts his shoulders and tightens his lips. Soon, he explodes into more laughter.

Kostyantyn laughs with him, but he also becomes tender: he has never seen him laugh like that.

It's too beautiful. His sharp and honest laugh, childish and untidy.

It's a treasure.

“I have never been with a man,” Nikita reminds him laughing, although somewhat embarrassed, "I didn't get through the barrier of imagining the… the previous part.”

Kostyantyn contains more laughter. Nikita is adorable, so adorable in his ignorance that he only accomplishes one thing: to give him even more confidence in himself.

"So, you've imagined the previous part…” he murmurs with his most elegant tone.

"Yes…”

“And what happened in that part?”

“We kissed… a lot.”

“And what else?”

“We caressed each other…”

“And what else…?”

Nikita feels a painful stitch in the middle of his brain: thirst is more unbearable than he’s able to reason. He squeezes his lips again, bites them, confused between so many instincts that he doesn't know, that intrigue him, that make him dizzy in excess.

Why?

Why does everything seem so useless but so necessary?

“We hugged each other… and that's all,” he admits with innate shyness, but also having fun with the situation.

Kostyantyn smiles. The satisfaction that he experiences increases his ego in an almost childlike way.

“Nikita Alekseev: you’re more innocent than I thought.”

“I don't think so,” Nikita responds with a more adult laughter than the previous ones, endowed with a kind of mischief that, in him, isn't so common; he knows well, although he’s still embarrassed, how much he has wanted Kostyantyn all this time, Kostyantyn and all the novelty involved. “I just need to get carried away…”

“I see.” Kostyantyn nods, smiling, satisfied with everything he hears. Happy to have left much of the nervousness behind thanks to laughter and honesty, he feels allowed to advance a little more. “So, how would you like to get carried away…?” he asks.

Nikita has another chill. Laughter leaves him completely; the seriousness makes it his.

He has tried to think about this, to advance inside the scene. He’s not stupid, he knows that between men there are things that aren't as obvious as between a man and a woman, or so it seems in his ignorance. However, he hasn’t been able to do it, he has not been able to imagine it.

Until he understands it.

For that Kostyantyn's past that he now knows, there is only one possible answer:

“You decide,” he asks with tenderness, with conviction. Kostyantyn is dazzled for everything he expresses with his eyes; he gives him more and more confidence. “I know this is hard for you, that you have bad memories, and my lack of experience cannot cooperate too much today. I feel more comfortable with the idea that you decide: whatever it is, I accept it.” In the end, he looks at Kostyantyn with such maturity that he vanishes everything in the room, except his own pupils.

Kostyantyn, on the other hand, cannot be happier.

Nikita has understood him even to this delicate point.

It's wonderful.

“Are you sure?” he asks for precaution.

Nikita, although nervous, agrees with astonishing seriousness.

The mere idea of choosing gives Kostyantyn a different confidence. Maybe he doesn't have enough experience, not taking into account that, in all these years, he has rarely had intimacy because of his lack of fondness for pleasure without feelings, but he has a clear preference, one that is related to the role in which he feels most genuine when it comes to physical pleasure. He has, above all, the will to do the best possible, to learn. And learning is his specialty!

He doesn't doubt: making delicacy the protagonist of all his gestures, he urges him to get up. Nikita obeys him not without looking to one side, shy for the obvious, that he has no clothes. Trembling at the novelty, at the weight of the eyes on his skin, he sees himself standing in front of Kostyantyn, who, sitting on the couch, watches him doing an overexertion: he mustn't get lost, he mustn't distort reality for everything that Nikita inspires, that visceral need to kiss every millimetre of his skin, to spend an eternity in every point, to take his time, but also to do everything at once, voraciously. He must keep as close as possible to reality, to take care of him, to make him happy.

Then, everything would be perfect.

He pretends a smile that looks as convinced as his elegant gestures, but that exposes, before Nikita, a certain nervousness. Kostyantyn's hands hold Nikita's hands; blue eyes ask for confidence from the dark ones. Kostyantyn's hands pull in slow motion; Nikita understands what he's asking for.

He sits on Kostyantyn's lap with his legs expressing the same nervousness as his eyes, which look at Kostyantyn as if they were in the middle of an earthquake, trembling more than the rest of his body. One leg on each side of the thighs and the hands on the shoulders, the face barely higher than Kostyantyn's, each one's chest touching the other, with nothing that prevents them from perceiving themselves even in the most explicit. They have been in this position before, but never like this, without anything that separates them.

It's explicit, yes, but it's beautiful.

Kostyantyn's arms surround his waist; in his eyes, the emotion seems to increase the brightness of the blue, even when, in the eyebrows, a subtle tremor transmits nothing but anxiety. Nikita contemplates him in wonder, without understanding anything, understanding everything.

He loves him.

He's perfect, in body, in soul, and he loves him as the human who he was, and longs for his blood as the _shadow_ who he is.

The position is suggestive enough; what Kostyantyn proposes is obvious. A spark of fear shines in Nikita's eyes, a spark that urges Kostyantyn to exert himself.

Because he craves nothing more than to have Nikita, to take care of him, to help him learn as well.

Kostyantyn smiles: that's how it will be. He doesn't need anything else, not with electricity revolutionizing his body and his heart at the same time. He’s an idealist, he always will be, and he doesn't want to stop being one, but he has sought this for too long.

The pleasure of the body and the pleasure of the heart, possible and equally intense with the same being.

With his fingers, he caresses Nikita's cheeks, who doesn't stop looking at him with disturbing fixity under reddish lights that mutate second by second, slowly, in a loop as eternal as their lives can be in this shared darkness. Electricity impacts inside and outside them, meanwhile; their skins beat when their hearts react, beat as if they were another heart, one that is only activated by touch.

“It's okay… like this…?” Kostyantyn asks, in need of this, to make sure that Nikita feels comfortable.

When he nods in spite of the spark of fear that beats in his dizzy pupils, he knows he is.

"You'll love it…” he swears in a whisper.

Then, Kostyantyn feels how all emotions crowd in his throat. It's like when he's about to sing on stage, although different.

He’s no longer alone in that idealized Wembley.

He will no longer feel the magic of his feelings in loneliness!

Because that's what it's all about, that and nothing else. That's why it's useless! Because it's not about pleasure, not for them.

It's about love.

Today, for everything that come together means, it can only be about love.

That's why he couldn't imagine it well, that's why he hasn't done justice to this scene; worried about the image of two bodies, he has forgotten where that image should be born.

Of the true beauty, that of their feelings linked as they already are thanks to the trance.

It's useless, because they are already bonded. But it's also necessary, to do it in the middle of this different exaltation, using this different language.

The pleasure that they long to give themselves.

The lips squeeze approaching naturally; they don't kiss. They are limited, together, to cause sensations that also the eyes, fixed on the other, infect. Electricity is like a hot iron, burns as well as electrifies; the other's mouth is iron, and the heat born in their lips travels through the blood that keeps them alive in the conceptual.

Nikita perceives, for the second time, how blood circulates through his body. He remembers that human passion it’s about, in a few words, how blood accumulates at certain points while the heart rate increases. He knows that his _shadow_ heart works steadily only when he feeds, and then is sporadic, loses frequency the longer the _shadow_ passes without feeding. Now, with Kostyantyn's lips on his, Nikita notices how his heart beats with vehemence, not only in speed but also in strength. Each beat seems to reduce him to nothing, destroys him, elevates him, transforms him.

In the darkness of the pupils he sees a mirror: he's no longer him, but a sensation.

Blood accumulates in the most sensitive parts of his body; that's what it's all about, that his body works in a different way, that different blood makes things feel different.

The desire is more intense than when he was human, he understands, and it's related to the thirst that, inclemently, distracts him from everything else, everything, except the important.

Love.

Thirst is the maximum source of desire that fills him, perhaps, or that he manages to reason untidily. It's the thirst that Kostyantyn causes that which produces everything else, the sensitivity, the need to get lost in the skin, the electricity that keeps him in another existential plane, trapped in sensations as sweet as voluptuous. He's floating in a dark world, in a sphere that changes and changes and changes its colour.

He's trapped in the eyes, drowning, and nothing could make him happier.

Because they are already together and nothing else is needed, they are for the shared embrace at the bottom of the deep water.

But they need to embrace themselves outside of it too.

Oh, the epiphany. How much it burns when it's discovered! They perceive each other: it's about love, not pleasure. Because pleasure takes time, months, years; pleasure is learned through practice, it's neither magical nor automatic.

Love it is. The expression of that love it is. The idea of embracing with their bodies, just as they are already embracing themselves with their emotions in the deep water, that from which comes the magic that elevates them, speaks about a different consummation.

It's about embracing each other in all possible ways. They have already done it during the trance, also when they sing together.

Now they can do it in the third language that, for both, represents a transcendental expression: the language of the skin.

Fuck fear!

Nikita follows Kostyantyn's eyes: they look at his mouth, they look at his curls, they look at his chest, they look at his neck. Both perceive a sweet inexperience in the energy of the other; That is enough for them to feel empathy.

How to kick out fear?

Kostyantyn's hands tighten on either side of Nikita's waist; he releases an accidental moan. Kostyantyn squeezes him against his chest without blinking once.

He has to earn him.

He has to deserve him!

He sighs, desperate; Mélovin and Kostya are shouting at each other inside his heart. Both yearn for Nikita, they yearn for him in abstract, indescribable forms, but they do it in vain, because the metaphor no longer works, not after the trance.

It's him, Kostyantyn complete, who must earn Nikita.

Insecurity, before this ethereal but real, tangible mirror, has no place.

No, no more.

Nevermore!

"I love you," Kostyantyn sighs before throwing himself on his lips.

Kissing each other: this way, they can kick out fear, prejudice, pressure, everything.

The universe.

Nikita receives him with a moan of surprise; a second, and the vehemence of the body, of the energy, of the heart that beats out of control against him, infects him to the depths of his being. Containing tears that he doesn't understood, those coming from the love that beats in the centre of his heart, he clings to Kostyantyn's shoulders and responds the kiss not with the lips, but with the soul, squeezing the eyelids, sobbing over the mouth that kisses him, overcome by the emotion that burns him in the exact way.

The mouths kiss as if a century had passed since the last time. They do it quickly, with precise but untidy caresses, with the teeth, with the corners of their mouths, with the skin of their whole faces. Kostyantyn puts a hand to Nikita's neck, urges him to lean to the right; Nikita follows him, deepens the kiss, hugs more, presses one chest to the other. In the disorder, shines the despair born of the feeling that burns them equally, this absurd, but genuine, need to pierce the other’s skin, to be the same, of losing individuality in the arms of love. But the kiss gives in second by second, relaxes the cravings of the most irrational side of their feelings, and transforms despair into calm, into harmony. The mouths, joined like two pieces of a puzzle, slow down, but increase the intensity.

They breathe in the other's mouth, get air where they can; the sensitivity of their skins in contact condemns them to the same manifestation. The lights of the room disappear, also the room, also the world; embracing themselves with inhuman forces, kissing only with the lips, caressing them, squeezing them, they moan at the same time.

They separate. Both breathe looking into each other's eyes, and Kostyantyn feels how an unusual force arises from his chest, that born from the anguish that being separated from Nikita means. He kisses the parted lips one time, ten times; Nikita frowns too much as he answers each time, at the same time, the mouths synchronized thanks to the magic that produces, in each heart, the most sublime pain.

They sob when they kiss, slowly, intensely. Kostyantyn surrounds Nikita's back with his arms and cuts his lower lip with a delicate bite. He kisses the lip all the times he can, transfers Nikita's desire to his body through the drops of blood that so many sensations confess him; he shudders when he feels him, so accompanied in the tremors and intermittent gasps, in the sensations that unleash everything. Nikita doesn't stop looking at him for a moment, hypnotized by how erotic is the presence of blood, between spasms that he cannot control and that are more exaggerated than he perceives over Kostyantyn's trembling lap, between tears that he cannot stop, that fall off without more, feeling as weak and as strong, as vulnerable as invincible.

It's like having his chest opened, like when he reached his human death. It's as if Kostyantyn extracted the blood directly from his heart.

As alchemy, Kostyantyn transforming his heart into something better for this intimacy, into something more than a concept; Kostyantyn transforming his heart into one more, a heart shared by the two of them.

Thirst paralyzes him. At the same time, it causes a heart-breaking vehemence within his body, one that he doesn't understand, because he has never felt it. Trembling, he squeezes Kostyantyn's shoulders. Nikita, as he perceives, is finally getting carried away, and is as passionate as he is. In the energy, in the kisses, in what the blood confesses there is a drama, a seriousness, a tenderness overwhelmingly compatible in the background. As their voices have been each night next to the piano, as well as their feelings are in the deep water, in the compatibility of energy is the naturalness they need to feel in order to act.

They don't have to think about anything, they discover when they leave reason at the same moment, by letting it fall to the ground as dead as their human bodies are in the conceptual. They just have to do one thing.

Follow the energy, this red line that it traces on their inhuman skins with each kiss, with each touch.

Follow, above all, their hearts, that beating within each chest seemed in flesh and blood, one over the other, the veins linked between the blood that keeps them alive.

Kostyantyn massages Nikita's waist with his fingers. He cannot stop shaking nor lower the anxiety that eats him from the inside, Mélovin’s cries asking for more and more blood, but the emotion that overwhelms him, the one that softens his eyelids between warm tears pulled by the memories, creates, within the deep water, the perfect balance.

Although annoyed with himself when he understands it, he drops the idealism to the ground.

It will not be perfect, not today, not considering how much he's disturbed by the lacerating emotion that Nikita causes him, as heart-breaking as the thirst that enhances his sensibility already notorious, but it will be as much as possible, as beautiful as possible.

It will be an offering; he will tear out his heart and give it to the one who represents it all. Like to tell him, like to beg him between tears and tremors.

 _Take my heart, Nikita_.

_Never let it go._

He massages his waist, also the lower part of his stomach. Nikita writhes on him, and rubs him shaking, and raises a hand, desperate, in pursuit of drinking from his lips as well.

Kostyantyn stops a cut from his nail by holding his wrist. He contains a laugh when he reads the disappointment in the dark eyes. He shakes his head, showing seduction under the faint violet lights; he holds him by the thighs in a movement that, although brusque, also has its amount of delicacy, of security, of experience.

Nikita, as he can for the weakness that thirst pronounces every second a little more, clings to him with arms and legs. He sees, before his eyes, how the couch, the wall, the bathroom door, the scattered towels are moving away from him. The lights darken around him, he sees them as ghosts wandering around his immobilized body, until he stops seeing the wall. Everything goes off, but it lights up more intensely when the ceiling appears triumphant over him.

The mirrors at the corners make the room look like a kaleidoscope; Kostyantyn's face, under the blue light and with drops of blood staining the corners of his mouth, seems sunk deep in the ocean.

It's the most perfect image he has ever seen in his life.

Because there is humanity in Nikita, that's why he feels, that's why he exists, that's why he's moved by the perfection of the image, but now he's a _shadow_ , as well as Kostyantyn, and it's in blood where he finds the answer to the enigma.

Beauty it's not mysterious, not when you have your own nature clear: you will always find it where you can feel it, not see it.

Beauty is obvious when you are a _shadow_ : it's always in the blood of those who you love.

Kostyantyn smiles with more emotion than desire, more like Kostya than like Mélovin. But the metaphor no longer works, effectively, and that’s why, at the same time, he also smiles in the other way, proud of himself, of being able to cause, in Nikita, this emotion and this desire that he can feel so well through the energy.

Kostyantyn's eyes fill with tears, however, because the nervousness hangs him and makes his body shake too much. The tears, as red as the drops of blood at the corners of his mouth, like the light that attacks him from behind, give his face a darker, wildest beauty. In the mouth, a smile as pure as that boy trapped in the deep water relaxes all of Nikita's feelings at the same time.

"Do you want me…?" Kostyantyn inquires looking into his eyes. There is a kind of seriousness in his voice, an understanding, a different determination, implacable in spite of the nervousness that the tremor expresses.

There is fear too, there is terror at the slightest idea of rejection.

Nonsense of those who need to learn to value themselves.

Swimming in the blue, free to swim in this one as he has never been anywhere, Nikita hardly agrees, with innate shyness, but above all with conviction, sorround by lights and electricity, by the increased sensitivity in the hands of thirst; Kostyantyn kisses his lips, and pierces Nikita's skin with astonishing, as if his mouth was air and not flesh. The energy betrays Kostyantyn, lets Nikita know how deep is his happiness. Feeling him is enough to know how much he missed him even though only a tiny minute has passed since the last kiss, how much he needed to feel his mouth on him like this, dominating everything, the kiss, himself. And his lips dominate him when he opens his mouth, by taking himself beyond him, by holding his cheeks and squeezing them between his fingers, rubbing their noses and also their teeth while thumbs draw, on his skin, a thousand circles at a time. And he’s dominated by the breath with which Kostyantyn fills the kiss, agitated, echoing inside Nikita, causing his own breathing to get out of control more and more. And the blood that sweetens his existence seduces him with its taste subtly dispersed by the lips of one and the other, Nikita's lower lip caught in a loop that hits him like a wave throwing him to one side, to the other, to the other.

It's perfect, but it's not enough.

Kostyantyn leans his chest on his as he caresses his lips with his teeth, and only when he does so Nikita realizes that he's kneeling by his side, next to his trembling legs.

A hand pulls him from the jaw, turns him to the left; they look at each other, on their sides, and only then Nikita understands the obvious.

They are in the bed.

Like when they sang together in his apartment, so many nights singing so many songs, falling in love through their voices, through the third voice born of a perfect harmony, one possible thanks to the naturalness, to the compatibility. They are in the bed, yes, and nothing will stop them.

It will happen.

A chill run through him, and Kostyantyn is the only one who makes it possible.

Nikita is terrified by everything he doesn't know; he’s naked before all his prejudices, those who have stopped covering him, but still observe him with fixity. But no: he shouldn't let fear stop him.

He has to…

Nikita looks at the drops of blood staining Kostyantyn's mouth, looks at the two red tears that descend through his face, one under each eye. They turn into metal, and his lips the magnet that can reach them.

Trembling, he kisses the blood in the mouth, takes each drop with patience, slowly, caressing more than kissing, delicately, although containing the temptation to bite, anxiety that each drop increases. He goes up, reaches the left tear and doesn't stop until the closed eyelid of a Kostyantyn that hallucinates inside and outside his eyes, lost in the sensations that explode in each sensitive point, who urge him to breathe hard, to pant, to writhe between spasms that embarrass him because of his hypersensitivity. He has never been strong when it comes to physical contact.

It's impossible when it's the sun who touches you.

Nikita's lips, hungry but respectful, go from one eyelid to another, kiss the closed eyes so intimately, so sweetly, that Kostyantyn finds this charming; how appropriate it feels after such a shared trance. But the lips go down the right tear, erase it with the same delicacy as before, between the same tremors, until they return to his mouth and kiss him once more, on one lip, on the other, on the tight jaw. Nikita goes through the bone of his jaw breathing every second a little stronger; next to his right ear he stops, sighs, but continues, and goes down the neck, and reaches his chest, and kisses, and every millimetre of existing skin he kisses him. He trembles too much, Nikita's body trembles against him; both tremble when they reflect each other.

Nikita is taking care of him.

He has to take care of him too.

He takes him from his face, confronts him with his eyes. Nikita breathes deep, but fast, and tears under the curls that fall on his forehead without knowing it. Among chills that attack him every second, Kostyantyn perceives the nervousness of the person who looks at him with such tenderness and so much fear fused with that warmth that never stops surrounding them.

He smiles at Nikita, who looks at him without strength, with half-closed eyelids, but as full of conviction as he is.

He moves forward, leans back Nikita on the bed, kisses the blessed mole under the right eye and fulfils the whim of kissing them all when he continues.

Nikita realizes what Kostyantyn is doing: he’s drawing a line on his skin, a line delineated by his moles. Those of the neck, those of the chest, those of the stomach. When the lips rub under his navel, he stops paying attention.

He looks at the ceiling, bewildered, but stops seeing it instantly.

Delirium comes to him: all sensations at once, nullifying him.

He moans when his back arches at the will of pleasure. He covers his closed eyelids with trembling hands.

He’s ashamed.

He writhes again, moans once more; thirst is as painful as the explicit desire is.

An electric discharge silences his brain when his back arches again, and again, and again, his body startled in the hands of enjoyment; it gives him a lot of shame how intimate the caresses become.

But he cannot stop him, there is no way.

He releases another sound, and another, and again, and none of them is a moan, and all seem to resemble more to pleads.

Opens his eyes under his trembling hands; his hip doesn't obey him anymore.

He cannot take it anymore.

He holds the grey sheets that are under him when the longing becomes untenable; his face, shy, turns to the right. These caresses are more intense than anything he has ever experienced. They are because of the desire that they increase, because of the tingling that they produce. It’s the most unbearable feeling he has experienced.

It's the real ecstasy. The one of the body, of love. 

A love that he has never felt until this point, that makes him understand the extraordinary: he had never loved before, any couple, no one. He had never loved a person so much, to the point of feeling that he holds his own heart between his hands, squeezing it so that it doesn’t explode, consoling it so that it doesn’t die.

He has never felt, in this scenario, the happiness that only love can provide.

He writhes on the bed, trembles beneath the caresses. Lulled by the feelings and the sensations, Nikita looks at Kostyantyn, who is, now, where he was before, kneeling next of his wobbly knees.

Kostyantyn smiles at him. Nikita feels that he wants to tell something to him, that he needs to do so, but the words don't come from him; Kostyantyn just needs to caress him tenderly on the right cheek to tell him his truth with no words.

 _I love you_ , that's what he's saying.

 _I love you and I'm really happy_.

Nikita caresses the hand on his cheek and smiles as best as he can. He nods, and Kostyantyn's eyes shine.

He loves him too, and a lot.

Again, Kostyantyn is full of nervousness that he tries to disguise: this is special, too special, and he knows that he will not survive a new disappointment. But no: the nervousness dissipates when he understands the most important thing, that Artem has so wisely told him.

Nikita is not Kristian.

Both are _shadows_.

Everything will be fine this time.

… Because he deserves it.

Serious, he also agrees, although the seriousness doesn't last long. He smiles, excited, and nods again for no reason.

Slowly, he takes his place. Nikita looks into his eyes all the time, enraptured, while delicate caresses weaken his legs even more. Kostyantyn whispers brief explanations, some necessary between men, others necessary between _shadows_ , about what it means to love as such; he asks that if something doesn't feel good, tell him, stop him, that it's okay. Nikita agrees to everything, but he doesn't hear anything.

Only Kostya's cheerful laughter, swimming to the surface, ready to come out through the eyes and be one with the _shadow_.

Laughter is like a voice singing; it hypnotizes him. He doesn't even feel able to use his talent, to perceive something in Kostyantyn; laughter is the only thing he hears, that he feels, that he cares about.

Above his eyes, the lights of the room are dyed blue; Kostyantyn's eyes, fixed on him, enlarge, cover the ceiling, cover all reality like a cloak capable of censuring everything that, now, it doesn't concern them.

A movement, and Nikita cannot see anything.

He inhales involuntarily, in shock. Feels his trembling hands that, suspended in front of Kostyantyn's shoulders, cannot touch the skin. Feels, on over his neck, how Kostyantyn squeezes his closed eyelids against his skin. Both of them tremble, they do it almost with exaggeration.

Above him, it's as if reality were blinking, as if it were going off and on again and again. At times, he distinguishes where he is; at others, he's only capable of one thing.

To feel him.

But no.

The eyelids tighten more against the skin of his neck; Nikita hears a kind of whisper from him.

What does he say…?

“Don’t ever leave me…”

Is that what Kostyantyn says…?

“I’ll not leave you…” he responds by hugging him with more strength, desperate to calm his insecurity.

The caresses insist on the skin of his legs after a moment of doubt, of terror; Nikita plunges into the unknown when another movement, one alone, gentle, sweet, ends what has just begin. He contains a scream.

He feels him, finally.

He clings to Kostyantyn's back with restless hands. His heart has stopped, literally.

It's unbearable.

Breathing with irregularity, incapable of reasoning, of understanding, of locating himself within this different world, he knows that he has never felt more vulnerable; he doesn't understand more than that. It's different from every encounter that he remembers and that he forgets a second later; it's different because of the obviousness that it would be irrelevant to describe, but above all because of the intensity of the feeling that they share.

This is new, and yes, it's unbearable. It is for all the right reasons.

The stillness follows, a stillness accompanied by a deep darkness, by a silence that only his own breathing disturbs, by a thirst that drives him crazy, that doesn't let him continue. A thousand questions crowd his throat, overwhelmed by everything he feels and doesn't understand.

What should he do?

How can he express to Kostyantyn this happiness that threatens to destroy his heart?

A thumb caresses his right cheek while the eyelids stop pressing against his skin. Nikita turns around because the thumb asks him to do so by pressing his cheek gently.

The lights blink on both, stopped on the blue; Kostyantyn's eyes, between blinking and blinking, look at him full of an indescribable emotion.

And how useless are words!

"Easy…" he whispers as he talks with his breath.

Nikita understands, then, that the one who makes the lights blink is himself. It's his own energy, as overwhelmed as he is for feeling what he feels.

The bond.

The unbearable perfection of their bond.

He tries to say something, but Kostyantyn shakes his head. _I love you_ , he seems to tell him again, with his eyes and without saying a word.

 _I love you, and I can hardly believe that I deserve you_.

Nikita is shaking excessively against Kostyantyn's mouth, half-open, showing his smiling fangs. The thumb tries to calm him down, the voice that is left in Kostyantyn too, but no, nothing works. He closes a little his eyelids, dizzy before the eyes that blink at the rate at which the light, always stopped on the blue, does it. He tries to say something one more time; he cannot. His body is tense, on alert.

"Relax your breathing…" Kostyantyn whispers as he covers his right cheek with one hand and sinking his nose against the other, holding him firmly. "You’ll feel better, I promise…" warns by moving his hand up and down, caress that, in Nikita, only produces the opposite effect: it agitates him more.

However, he nods.

Kostyantyn asks him to follow him, to breathe at the rhythm he breathes, with depth, regularly; the hand rises when inhaling, while, and lowers when exhaling.

It's assumed that they don't need to breathe, but the effects that to do so have on the circulation, muscular tension, the alertness are identical to those that occur in humans, even more exaggerated. Nikita fights against agitation by following, little by little, the rhythm that Kostyantyn suggests: first, he does it with untidiness; then, noticing how the lights stop blinking, he knows that he does it in an identical way to the one who holds him, following, also, the rhythm of the hand that goes up, and goes down, and goes up.

"Like that, good…" Kostyantyn whispers as he turns Nikita's face towards him, looking at him with emotion, smiling at him in the same way.

To look at Nikita is enough to convince him: Kostyantyn sobs almost with embarrassment when he looks at him in the eyes, when he discovers that he hasn't lied to him, that he hasn't left, that he's here with him, and he will never leave, and they will survive.

It's the happiest moment of his life.

How much he has underestimated his own feelings, Kostyantyn discovers, that during all this time he had believed that being like this with Nikita, so unbearably attached to him, it would be difficult because of his past. It makes him nervous, he doesn't feel enough, but the happiness of feeling him against him is so much, is so powerful, that he's not able to remember anything.

No! There is nothing!

In the arms of love, there is nothing.

Looking at Nikita like this, the two of them making an effort to not to get too agitated, to relax and leave behind all fear and all pain, nothing else exists.

Except the other and what they feel: the only thing that needs to exist. 

He laughs despite the sobs he contains; Nikita follows him, though timidly. They look at the other with fixity after the laughs, in a trance for the shared feeling.

It feels good to be like this. It feels obvious, a reunion, as if this had happened a million times, maybe in other lives, perhaps because of the naturalness with which their energies have been mutually reinforced during all this time, perhaps because it's like the harmony of their voices expressed by their bodies, perhaps because they are embraced inside their hearts. It's easy, after all. Necessary.

It's the fullness.

Nikita caresses, with his fingertips, the hand that Kostyantyn keeps on his cheek. In his eyes, the tears blink under the violet lights. Kostyantyn understands.

They can continue.

Excited, with his pride asking him for absolute perfection in everything he does from this moment, Kostyantyn kisses him in a simple brush. The hand with which Nikita caresses him goes up, nervous for the anticipation, and holds on to the pillow.

Kostyantyn doesn't hesitate: he deepens the kiss by bringing his hand from the cheek to Nikita's hand. He holds it, intertwines the fingers of one and the other, and rises above him, never letting go of his lips.

Between the lights, the scene becomes distorted when the movement starts; only the eyes are visible when, imitating each other, they open wide when the mouths separate. The pupils of one and the other, separated by tiny millimetres, move away, approach, get lost behind the tears, but return after feverish blinks forced by the sensations. In the eyes they concentrate, in everything that the eyes transmit when they get lost, when they rediscover themselves; in the eyes, but also in the identical heat that they share, in the heat that, when it's linked, burns beneath their skins between gentle noises that they release and that nothing but calmness, slowness, devotion denote.

Nikita circles his waist with one arm, always watching him. Can he feel what he feels?

Kostyantyn is as happy as he is?

When the pupils seem to rub against each other, Nikita gasps a little harder, hypnotized by the lights, by the eyes, by the thumb, by the movement, by the tingling that goes off and on and expands and contracts within him. Panting, he discovers what the impression hasn't allowed: he likes it.

Two linked bodies whose hearts embrace, whose voices claim the other’s; he likes to feel it for the first time.

Placing a hand on either side of Nikita, Kostyantyn kisses him, and kisses him, and contains laughs, and looks at him with tears in his eyes. The gasps, sharp at times and more like grunts at others, let him know that something, in Nikita, it feels good. This is also what Nikita's hands tell him when he holds him by the waist almost unconsciously, with a more abrupt movement than this sweet instant seems to enable.

When he perceives the strength of the grip, Kostyantyn, too focused on Nikita's enjoyment, which is as beautiful as his face and voice, whose heat is as intense as the sun's, he remembers his own when it manifests in a sudden electric discharge that paralyzes him, that makes him fall on one shoulder and forces him, without self-control, to moan for the first time.

Nikita looks at him with dizzy eyes, looks at Kostyantyn's tight eyelids, undone for enjoyment.

He also likes it. 

Nikita brings his hands to Kostyantyn's face. He caresses his cheeks trembling too much for the new stillness they share. Kostyantyn opens his eyes, Nikita notices the glow reddened by the tears that appear intermingled with an evident emotion. The eyes spit the energy, allow him to dive at will.

What happiness overwhelms Kostyantyn, the same that overwhelms him, identical. What fear behind happiness, and vertigo. How pure he is and how much he needs to be protected.

And he will protect him too, he swears when he smiles at the blue of the eyes and the ceiling.

Nikita hugs him, sinks his face on his neck, kisses his cheek as he turns a little towards him. He smiles against his ear, kisses it too.

"I'm here…" he reminds him.

Kostyantyn laughs against the neck and causes tickles in Nikita; he laughs to keep from crying, again. He deserves him, the voice shows him how much he deserves this overwhelming happiness, this unbearable bond, this act more emotional than physical, slow, untidy, but honest, real.

He continues, smiling, holding back the sobs that make his chest tremble. He feels something spreading through his body as the sweetest of viruses, in the form of electricity that bristles his entire skin; he feels the beautiful pain of love, that annoyance that could never annoying him beating strongly in the centre of the deep water, disturbing it with energy, with life. It's like a light, each reunion is a light that grows, and grows, and blinds him, and makes the pain of the past transform into something else, in something real, tangible, perfect despite the inexperience of his hips, these more typical of a human teenager than of an adult _shadow_. But the symbolic beats matter more, they matter more than his lack of practice.

Until a moan from Nikita makes him aware, once again, of his own pleasure.

He looks at him: Nikita's eyes express love, joy, vulnerability, desire. He caresses Nikita's neck and tries to control his breathing a little.

"Are you okay…?"

“Yes…"

What a teenager is Kostyantyn despite being much older than him. How many years he has kept his purity closed, that remains like this, intact. Always so idealistic…

But so sweet. So devilishly sweet, so much that he seems unreal.

Although he still feels shy, Nikita finds himself a little more familiar with this kind of intimacy than Kostyantyn seems to be; he's soft in a very wild way. Thinking of him, of his enjoyment and of the two, he takes command by squeezing the waist between his hands. Looking into his eyes, guiding him with his hands and with energy, he asks for more.

Kostyantyn closes his eyes against Nikita's forehead as he obeys, as he moves in the exact way his hands ask him. He does it one time, two, ten; he moans when the caresses cause another discharge, when the virus of love becomes the virus of pleasure, when a tingling plunge him in a tension from which he needs to be released, when the internal fire consumes him and consumes Nikita as well.

They moan together, more joined than they have been to the other or to anyone, feeling themselves in a sweet detail. Looking at each other, they transmit all the messages in unison, all the songs, all the gratitude.

They contain another cry, desperate; it’s too much.

Nikita kisses him, hugs him, asks the skins to dissolve and mix. They close their eyes when they press their foreheads firmly, they lose notion of what happens between their bodies, but not of the pleasure that grows, that tear them, that borders the madness so identically. They look for the other body, they do it with the same inexperience, and they only listen to what they cause, the choking moans, the clash of the skins, the subtle screech of the bed that suggests so much sensuality, and the caresses, and the touches, and all possible sounds, even their hearts.

They embrace more, they do everything they can; sobbing, they whisper the other's name and the feeling that to that name will be tied forever.

But the lights disappear when the ceiling does; Nikita sees the lights falling on Kostyantyn's face as they turn around. He smiles at him with confidence, touches his face fondly. On top of him, Nikita hallucinates.

With these lights on his face, with those eyes that belong only to him, Kostyantyn not only looks beautiful.

He looks complete.

Every tiny movement unleashes a revolution in Nikita; Kostyantyn is sweet, but is passionate.

It's the perfect balance, Kostyantyn loving him being Kostya and being Mélovin, being human and being _shadow_. Because there is purity, it shines in the eyes for having reached the surface, finally. Kostya is no longer trapped in the deep water; Mélovin no longer represses him on the inside.

They are all Kostyantyn, and it's his reconstructed, complete soul what shines inside his eyes.

It's _him_.

The situation has turned just as they have done it: the deep water is their bond, and it's no longer within Kostyantyn's eyes, but everywhere. Is wrapping them in each place.

It's that feeling that they reflect and share, that belongs only to them.

Nikita looks at him, and looks at him, and tears as pleasure rises, and lowers, and spreads through him along with happiness. He feels weak in his arms, fragile as a rose; he feels strong because of the inspiration that the eyes infect him, that of protecting, of taking care, of loving, of sharing. He feels so attached to him, so committed to him, that nothing but embrace him he can, while he stares at him. That, and enjoy, and get lost in the sweet but intense reencounters of their hurried bodies. The lights go from green to blue, meanwhile; the speed increases with the despair. The blue blinks between one and the other, they see and don't see each other, and the vertigo floods Nikita, fills him.

It's like being at the bottom of the ocean, in a perfect place for them, joined together without further stops, without further prejudice. Together, with the loneliness dead behind them.

Nikita kisses Kostyantyn when the lights blink more insistently, when the tingling that causes so much anxiety becomes his universe. Speed, kindness, unexpected accuracy; he feels close to something that he cannot conceive, that he doesn't remember, that he doesn't know.

Kostyantyn responds to the kiss without letting him go, tightening him even more; he has left the deep water, that where he felt so lonely for so long, to sink with a smile in other.

The one he can share with Nikita.

The definitive one.

They embrace at the same time, kissing and kissing, moving against each other; the energy shows how identical is the emotion that comes from the concept. They feel themselves between tremors, between gasps, squeezing with more strength than necessary. Nikita looks for him, too; he does it untidily, making his lack of experience more noticeable, but with enough impetus: he's sincere. His enjoyment it is, his happiness it is.

The closeness of bliss it is.

Kostyantyn, lost in the nonsense of what happens outside of his eyes, over the neck against which he holds his eyes as he squeezes his eyelids tightly, breathes through the mouth without being able to control it. He dies, he revives; extends his life beyond predictability. Among the blue lights that blink because of the energy that they have created around them, he feels how the tension grows, how he feels unable to tolerate it a second longer. Meanwhile, he listens to the irrational sounds that come from Nikita, which he releases against his shoulder with a hoarse voice. He feels that he loses him, that Nikita gets lost in the way because of the intensity of the tension, because of how immeasurable it seems to be that which is approaching between them, something unforgettable, something they will always remember.

Something transcendental.

Nikita sighs his name almost on the verge of tears, the human consumed by the _shadow_ ; Kostyantyn gets lost along the way too.

He caresses, confers more intensity to his body and his emotions. Nikita shakes on him, out of his wits; their energy puts out of control the lights around them. He yields to the basic instinct of seeking him with strength and perseverance, of caressing more. Nikita is lost, he loses him, he goes away in the energy that abandons him, that embraces the universe with its incalculable intensity.

A second, two, three; Nikita's energy it drags him, it takes him; it's time.

It's now.

His fangs bite Nikita's neck; he loses Nikita in the most sublime enjoyment, the one he expresses when he trembles profusely against his body, when he squeezes him with exaggerated forces, when he moans with the body and the heart how powerful is what he feels.

Nikita disarms in a second, overwhelmed by sensations. They are so intense, so immeasurable! Like to lose the skin in the hands of fire, to see it consumed and to see it reborn, to feel it bloom from his flesh to reconstruct what remains of him, what will prevail. He moans with a sincerity that he has never needed to express, that he has never felt so necessary. Kostyantyn leaves his neck; Nikita feels that all his bones fail at the same time.

After that, only silence remains.

He falls against Kostyantyn, destroyed, although Nikita never notices anything, not after this tingling that has ended by tearing his life with unbearably beautiful sensations that, however, he hasn’t known in splendour yet. Kostyantyn embraces him, holds him close to his body and feels pride and excitement at the same time: he lost him along the way, and what intolerable beauty has his enjoyment no longer timid, but untidy, honest.

Real, not ideal.

True in this deep water where only happiness takes place.

The light stops blinking; it goes from blue to green, from green to yellow. It repeats the cycle around them, around the stillness they share, around this Nikita who doesn't stop trembling as he feels how his skin is reborn in Kostyantyn's arms, who holds him by containing emotion and desire, giving him all the time in the world to recover from what both have caused.

Then, Nikita reacts: it's like coming back from an energetic trance, that's how intense this feels. It's like in the bathtub, but more heart-breaking.

He breathes on Kostyantyn's shoulder: he doesn't understand it, but at the same time he does it. He has to help him. He has to be the one to help him this time.

Light mutates in the same blue of Kostyantyn's eyes; Nikita, doing an overexertion, helps him as he can.

"Niki…" Kostyantyn sighs for the unexpected. "You don't have to… later…" he says, moved by how, despite being exhausted, Nikita seeks to take him to the same state that he has just experienced. He doesn't lie to him: he can wait, they have time.

But no, Nikita doesn't listen.

"You too…" he says gently.

Kostyantyn feels how the tingling makes his entire body tremble. He throws his head back to pant for him. Opens his eyes, sees how the blue beats, how the light flashes to their rhythm. He feels beating complete, his whole body exalting at the same time, by the movement, by the agitated breathing, by the hands that press his chest, by the lips that kiss his, by the love that the energy injects him. He escapes from the mouth when he loses himself, when the sensations suck him and melt him and expand him, when the electricity kills him only to revive him.

He releases an involuntary scream when the fangs bite his neck, and it's as if his whole life is rewinding, as if he were going back to 1986 in a blink: this time, everything is fine.

Everything that he has lived, pain, anger, resentment, regrets.

Everything was to reach Nikita, to find him in the deep water, to embrace him forever.

With Nikita still on his neck, Kostyantyn trembles, cries, laughs; it’s a pleasure to see that he understood the function of the blood in the scene, to weaken in order to expand the sensitivity, that this can take them even beyond the conventional.

Between the wrinkled sheets, cornered by Nikita's chest, the spasms diminish until the fangs leave him. Stillness continues, again.

He looks at the ceiling: the light continues its course, the clock keeps turning, but something inside him has stopped forever. Something of him will remain in this scene, something of him will always be in this moment, together for the first time with the being that symbolizes all the kinds of happiness at the same time, the one that doesn't need a frame around to be art, to be wonderful inside and outside of him.

"Niki…" he mumbles between laughs and tears.

This one, still over him, laughs too. He looks up at him, looks at him sideways, and how funny he seems with the situation despite the notorious emotionality that the energy of both transmits.

“You never explained to me how to love as a _shadow_."

“I explained it to you before we start.”

“Really?”

“Yes, Niki… Did you not hear me?!”

“I didn't…”

They laugh against each other's mouths. Kostyantyn rolls over him and leans on his chest as he puts an arm around his waist. Nikita combs his hair with his fingers. It's so simple.

Like this, with Nikita, being happy is too simple.

"How rude, don't listen to your master of vampire erotic arts," Kostyantyn says feigning solemnity, although the mask falls fast. He laughs like a child.

Nikita, leaving his hair to surround his shoulders, follows him.

"How pretentious."

"Do you believe so? Don't underestimate me, just let me take practice and you'll see!"

Nikita chokes a laugh against his hair. His voice comes naturally from his throat:

“ _I am the son and the heir of a shyness that is criminally vulgar_ …”

Kostyantyn suddenly gets up, outraged.

“t.A.T.u? Now? Seriously? How unnecessary!“

Nikita laughs out loud.

"The Smiths. I have a lot to teach you, Mr. Learner…”

“Hey!”

But Nikita hugs him again, and combs him, and sings between laughs that make him go out of tune in the sweetest way:

“ _I am the son and heir of nothing in particular_ …”

Pale lights, violet and then reddish, enhance the colour of the blood stains that cover their lips and fangs, a blood adorned by Nikita's voice, that in whispers sings while he caresses Kostyantyn. The image of love stained with blood may seem repulsive to those who don't know how to see the beauty on it, every image will be repulsive for those who cannot access the concept with the eyes of the heart.

For them, embraced inside and outside the deep water, the image is precisely that, the basic definition of beauty.

Happiness in its purest state.

The one that is real.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're at this point of the page, thanks for reading. ♥
> 
> There's only two more chapters and maybe I will upload them together (just if I can, sadly): I feel a little uncomfortable with the extension (my idea was another, but this monster it devoured me) and I need to stop. It will be a little epilogue too. Very little, just some 2k words or less. And that's it. 
> 
> I just hope that you like it. :')
> 
> See you in the next update. I will try to upload soon. 
> 
> Thank you! ♥
> 
> … 
> 
> Dedicado a Marcos, porque siempre que escribo sobre amor significa que escribo sobre vos, sobre nosotros dos, sobre ese tercer ser, intangible pero real, que no es más que nuestros sentimientos fusionados de la forma más perfecta que pueda existir. Te amo. ♥


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